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Efforts Towards Wastewater Treatment and Drive to Provide Sanitation in Cambodia by Purva Juvekar

Two weeks into our stay, my teammate and I were invited to attend Cambodia’s 9th Sanitation in Challenging Environments (SCE) Forum under the theme of "Technologies Testing, Designs, and Manual" organized by Engineers Without Border Australia. The SCE Forums are an opportunity to come together and share information on topics regarding sanitation, hear case studies, share research, and work together to develop innovative solutions and partnerships to improve sanitation access for communities living in challenging environments in Cambodia.

Presentations were made by several stakeholders who were working towards developing sanitation solutions in Cambodia. Wetlands Work!, our senior design client, also presented their technical solution and provided updates on its progress. Wetlands Work! is a social enterprise that designs and builds innovative systems to tackle the problem of wastewater management in Cambodia. WW!’s product is the HandyPod, an aquatic wastewater treatment system which is installed under a floating house’s toilet. It treats raw sewage by using microbial communities from plants and their roots.

In addition to presentations, the International Development Enterprises (iDE) and EWB hosted a design challenge towards the end of the conference, where they split the audience into teams of Engineers and Community. I was put into a team of 5 and we were the Engineers. We were given 10 minutes to interact with the Community team and ask them questions about sanitation and the issues they faced. The Community team was asked to create a hypothetical problem and environment. We were then given 10 minutes to come up with a solution which would fit the user needs of the Community and address their challenges. At the end, we had to pitch our solution to everyone. It was a fun challenge and helped me break the ice and interact with others despite a language barrier.

I was happy to be at the conference and see that so many people were working with passion to bring clean water and sanitation to communities in Cambodia. It showed me that people cared, and just how innovative their solutions were. 
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