Summary

Almost 100,000 people live in dense floating communities on Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake. During the low water dry season many experience poor health as their local ambient water becomes contaminated and often septic.

Using WW!’s HandyPod treatment system, we have demonstrated that a floating household’s wastewater can be contained and treated to a high grey water standard, allowing ambient water outside the Pod to be recreationally healthful. By significantly improving local ambient water quality as well as making cleaner, safer ambient water for household use, WW! fosters better health among children and families and a more robust surrounding natural environment for economically valuable fish and aquatic biodiversity.

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An aquatic HandyPod is inserted beside a floating house toilet, capturing the raw sewage and treating it within the HandyPod using microbial biofilm processes. The HandyPod was successfully tested in floating villages for over five years, leading to a product that promotes gender dignity and isolates and treats wastewater efficiently with no aesthetic problems in terms of smell or ‘floating visuals’, no mosquitoes, no chemicals, and basically no maintenance.

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We have adapted our family-size HandyPod system for floating and floodplain schools with up to 100 users per system. In addition to wastewater treatment, we also provide proper handwashing facilities and comprehensive WASH training for teachers at floating schools.

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The ‘proof of concept’ of the HandyPod was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Exploration Challenges Program for Water and Sanitation and Conservation International; the pilot scale-up of the HandyPod was trialed in 10 floating villages, supported by CIDA's Grand Challenges Canada Program for Stars in Global Health.

Much of our initial activities in floating schools was funded by a crowd-funding campaign with the World Toilet Organization in 2016. Today, the European Union is supporting our floating school and home sanitation program.