Update – The Biogas Community Toilet and Shower Project is now in place!

As a part of our mission to help the communities where our sponsored children live Kindu has installed Gondar town’s first biogas community service: a public toilet with eight rooms, four showers, four toilets, hand-washing facilities, and a kitchen—all powered using waste processed through the bio-gas digester creating fuel. We worked with residents, a biogas engineer and local government offices and the project is scheduled to be self-financing by the end of the year.

Biogas is a modern source of energy that converts organic waste and manure into a gas that is suitable for cooking. At the moment most households in Ethiopia use wood or charcoal; as well as encouraging deforestation these fuels are costly and non-renewable. The use of biogas can reduce a household’s fuel expenditure by 80%.

So in January 2013 The Kindu Trust opened a public toilet and shower facility with a biogas digester in the Abiye-Egzi Kebele (district) of Gondar. Waste from the toilets and organic waste from the neighbourhood are converted into methane which heats the showers and provides a kitchen area with cooking gas.

Thanks to the project three members of the community are employed full-time, and residents are using the kitchen to cook and sell their food. The Biogas Community Toilet and Shower has proved popular as a way of providing a renewable energy source and improving sanitary conditions, and we are already looking into replicating the project into other districts!

To visit the project page, click here.