Provide the local conditions using geo-physical, technical, socio-cultural, legal, financial as well as criteria concerning capacity and management. Set how many system options you want to pre-select and if they are to be chosen according to local appropriateness or resource recovery and losses.

 

Appropriateness Criteria

You can provide your local conditions to calculate the technology appropriateness score. The data you provide does not necessarily have to be very accurate, but plausible. Use only the most relevant criteria. 

The Practitioners Guide helps you to define which criteria to use.

SaniChoice offers you to choose from almost 30 appropriateness criteria including geo-physical, technical, socio-cultural, legal as well as criteria concerning capacity and management. There are also criteria specific to the humanitarian setting. We recommend to use a limited number of criteria (three to 15) to get meaningful results. 

In most cases, the data to be entered in SaniChoice is available at early stages of the planning process (e.g. based on household surveys and baseline studies), but sometimes additional reports or an informed guess is required. For instance, for the criteria electricity supply you will be asked:

How is the electricity supply in your case for aeration, ventilation, pumping or other power-consuming activities?

You can then allot the proportions (%) of the area that have either full electricity supply, intermittent supply, or no electricity at all.

SaniChoice then compares each technology requirements (in this case the electricity requirements) to the case setting. The match of the technology requirements with the case data provides an appropriateness score between 0% (not appropriate) and 100% (fully appropriate). The aggregation of all criteria scores (using a geometric mean) results in the Technology Appropriateness Score (TAS).

 

System Settings

The final output of SaniChoice is a set of locally appropriate sanitatioin systems. This set can be generated using different conditions:

  • Number of Systems
    In a participative process, only a few options can be discussed meaningfully with stakeholders. A manageable number of options lies somewhere between three and 15. 
  • Target
    By default, SaniChoice provides the systems with the highest system appropriateness scores. But systems can also be selected according to one of the resource products such as phosphorus, nitrogen, total solids (as an indicator for organics and energy) or water. Either the potential recovery ratios are considered or the losses to soil, air, and surface waters.
  • Selection Type
    To allow trade-offs to become visible when comparing systems, SaniChoice uses the system templates to provide a diverse set of options ("Diversity"). Each option that is selected is from a different preselected template. To ignore the templates, the selection type can be set to "Ranking". 
  • Maximize
    By default, SaniChoice provides the options with the highest target. But one can also select by the minimal target, e.g. by the least product losses by setting "Maximize = False".

 

Load Cases

It can be difficult to start entering data from scratch. To help you getting started you can load one of the exemplary cases and adapt according to your needs.

Load a case.