Celebrating Our 2021 Achievements

As we enter a new year, we look back at 2021 and the many milestones our team achieved together

The year 2021 started with many uncertainties –COVID-19 waves, new variants, and vaccine availability in Rwanda. Despite challenges such as lockdowns, curfews, and transportation restrictions we served more household customers than ever before and reached new milestones with flying colors! Here’s a look at what we were up to in 2021.

One of Pit Vidura’s Service Delivery Teams

We emptied more pits than ever before and prevented contamination of residential urban environments

In 2021, we had a goal of emptying 1000 pits. To achieve this, we needed an 11% increase in our annual sales. At the end of the year, we were happy to record a 17% increase from the previous year for a total of 1,051 pits emptied

Fig 1. Customers Served With Pit Vidura’s Safe Sanitation Services in 2021

Emptying 1051 pits means that over 10,000 m³ of pathogen-containing waste was removed from the urban environment where vulnerable low-income populations live. As always, we did this work in a way that protects communities and workers alike. We updated the PPE used by our service teams and started a program in which our service team members, in addition to our sales agents, can sell services to people in their own communities and reap the benefit of commissions.

We acquired new equipment to better serve out-of-reach last-mile households

Due to the narrowness of roads in many low-income areas of Kigali, we decided to purchase a smaller truck (5m3). This new truck will enable us to extend our service reach and serve clients with affordable services, even in the most inaccessible areas of Kigali.

New 5m3 truck in duty; Pit emptier loading barrels and Pit Vaq in the flatbed truck after serving a customer

In addition to accessing hard-to-reach areas, using this new truck will lower service costs for low-income in these areas. To serve these areas previously, we used a portable pump, a barrel system, and a flatbed truck to serve these areas. The old process was time and resource-intensive. With the new truck, more efficient pumping is possible and we can pass the savings onto the low-income clients in these areas.

We published in peer-reviewed journals

As a live lab, sharing our learnings is also an integral part of Pit Vidura. In the past year, we leveraged our logistics data to conduct a time-and-motion study. The peer-reviewed study, published in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene for Development draws insights on improving the efficiency of our process. Read it Here.

We shared our work with practitioners and researchers around the globe

Over the course of 2021, we found ourselves at four conferences and shared our work with other practitioners around the world.

See our talks below::

  • SIWI World Water Week 2021 ( August 2021)

We collaborated with other regional social enterprises to improve sanitation for marginalized populations outside of Rwanda

Although our main operations are based in Kigali, we strive to do work and research that impacts the improvement of sanitation for communities across the globe. We were able to increase our global impact by partnering with the amazing social enterprise, Sanivation, based in Naivasha, Kenya. The task we collaborated on was completing a community assessment for the World Bank that would inform the improvement of a bucket toilet system in Wajir, Kenya. We learned a lot from working with Sanivation, and were able to extend expertise in mapping, household surveying, and focus groups with various community stakeholders.

Onsite sanitation system used in Wajir; Bucket toilet system

We transitioned to a 100% East African Leadership Team

We made substantial changes to our organizational structure in order to align with our goal of decolonizing the work that we do. As of now, our core team is led by a 100% East African Team. Our new board of advisors has been super supportive, and we are grateful to have an incredible group of experts who can support our local leadership team and connect us to tools and resources that help us achieve out our goals.

Bruce Rutayisire