Toilet that 'nourishes' a family

Most households in Malawi look up to their farms for food. But few produce enough to feed their bellies annually. The majority yield insufficient harvests because they cannot afford a bag of fertilizer to nourish their crops. Access to subsided fertilizers remains shrouded in corruption, perennially leaving incalculable poor households under threats of hunger. However, as Nora Baziwelo from Mtandire slums in Lilongwe City proves, there is still hope even outside chemical fertilizers.

On a maize-packed veranda were two teenage boys packing the staple grain in 50 kilogram bags. Just a hoof inside the house stood 25 bags already swallowed with grains. And the ground floor was spread with abundant corncobs, left to dry.

“All this maize is from my farm, but I don’t apply chemical fertilizers, I use humanure,” started explaining Nora Baziwelo.

Like many slum dwellers, Basiwelo has no formal employment. She sells compost manure for a living and her husband, Edimon, is a carpenter.

She says their combined revenue is too little to buy enough chemical fertiliser, presently selling above K15, 000 a bag, to nourish their 2-hectare farm.

Yet, the Mtandire resident boasts of plenty food annually. But what oils the drive wheels to keep her family nourished year-round is something rare: toilet.

Baziwelo marvels at her maize grains on the veranda

Baziwelo uses Ecological Sanitation (Ecosan) toilet to compost waste. The toilet offers her cheap or free fertilizers and aids household food security.

“We used to struggle to buy fertiliser but since I started using the toilet manure, I don’t need fertiliser anymore,” she said.

After digesting her nsima, Baziwelo relives herself in an ecosan toilet. The dung is then contained in a sanitation installation for pathogen to die off. The process produces safe soil from faeces and fertiliser from urine. She uses the resultant humanure to nourish her farm where she yields enough maize, and then, the nsima returns on the table.

The Malawi Homeless People’s Federation member said when Center for Community Organization Development (CCODE) first introduced the ecosan toilet idea to her in 2008, she doubted its efficacy.

However, after trying it she realized human excrement is no waste product but holds nutrients to fertilise land and boost her crop production.

“Every six months I harvest enough manure which I apply to my crops and yields are always bumper” she said.

In the 2013/2013 national budget, government allocates K60.1 billion to the Farm Input Subsidy Program (Fisp) to allow poor households access a bag of basal or top dressing fertiliser at K500.

But with politics and corruption always preying on the subsidy program, many are poor farmers that it escapes profiting.

Eventually, most poor families continue producing fewer and fewer yields, much of which deplete before their next harvest and they chiefly depend on local markets for food purchases.

However, when most granaries are empty, prices of the staple grain skyrocket, stretching the poor’s economic muscle to a rupturing limit. Just two months ago, a 50 kilogram bag was trading at around K10, 000.

Baziwelo receives no fertilizer subsidy coupons yet that people spend nights in ADMARC deposits queuing for the staple grain is some shock she gets from radio bulletins, telecasts, and newspapers.

“I yield enough maize for the whole year and I don’t buy any additional food,” said Baziwelo.

In October 2012, the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee reported that about 2 million people (about 13 percent of the population) were food insecure.

Obviously, this hunger threatened population largely comprises the poor, who perennially record lean harvest because they cannot afford expensive fertilizers for their farms.

But like Baziwelo, they too can improve their food security with just an ecosan toilet within their compound.

Research indicates that one person produces enough wastes to supply nutrients to produce 250 kg of cereals yearly.

That means for a population of 15 million people, Malawi can annually produce 3,750,000 metric tonnes of maize using ecosan toilets, a figure which equals this year’s maize production estimates of 3.7 metric tonnes as reported by the Global Information and Early Warning Systems (GIEWS) on food and agriculture.

Already, Baziwelo has twenty five 50-kilogram bags; her veranda has abundant unpacked grains; and some corncobs are drying on the ground floor.

“I expect to pack at least 35 bags more when all the maize dry,” she said.

Baziwelo says the toilet-supported harvest is entirely subsistent. It feeds her extended family of 12, often sustains relatives and seldom supports hungry neighbours, who also admire the wonders of the ecosan toilet.

“At first I could sell some of my produce, but now I feed a bigger family so I wouldn’t risk selling,” she said.

Despite its potential to replace chemical fertilizers and help save billions government yearly spends subsidizing farm inputs, the use of ecosan toilets remains an exclusive of a few households.

For instance, in Mtandire slums, a habitant of about 18 000 people, only eight families use the ecosan toilet.

That means the rest will continue bribing chiefs for a subsidy coupon or else risk yielding less and brace to go to bed on empty bellies.

Already Baziwelo says she will not sell her produce, and if other farmers emulate, then government might as well start importing the grain using the K5billion it has allocated to replenishing Strategic Grain Reserves.

With sustainability of the subsidy programme looking foggy, maybe it is time Fisp was aborted and its funds channeled towards construction of ecosan toilets to give poor households sustainable fertilizer manufacturing factories, whose raw materials are already running in their bodies, daily.

Awkward as it may sound, but it will turn the citizens; especially the poor, into Baziwelos and nobody will care if Strategic Grain Reserves and ADMARC depots remained hungry, empty.