Experience with the Gulper Implementation in Jinja

One of USAID's Uganda Sanitation for Health Activity (USHA) goals was to enhance access to safely managed Fecal Sludge Management (FSM) services by supporting FSM entrepreneurs (FSMEs) to improve their business models.

Over the course of the project, USHA supported six FSMEs in four districts across three regions of Uganda. Four of the FSMEs were Cesspool Truck Entrepreneurs (CTEs) and two were Gulper Entrepreneurs (GPEs) whose experiences have been shared in a FSME learning brief. As a facet of this work, USHA piloted the gulper technology, which uses manually operated pumps to empty pit latrines that cannot be emptied using cesspool trucks. Gulpers can be useful in contexts where latrines are in congested, hard to reach areas, with unlined pits, and for customers cannot afford cesspool emptying.

This learning brief documents USHA’s experience supporting one of the GPEs and highlights the challenges encountered during implementation, documents the experience of the GPE’s use of the gulper technology and offers insights and guidance to implementers intending to support FSMEs in similar contexts.