Freetown City Council (FCC), the United Nations Capital Development (UNCDF) and GOAL, together with development partners, have on Thursday 18^th January 2024 visited the Faecal Sludge Treatment Plant in Kingtom, Freetown to review latest developments in the plant’s capacity to process liquid wastes into environmentally friendly products such as cooking briquettes, biogas, and fertilizers for agriculture.

The Faecal Sludge Treatment plant is a Transform Freetown initiative that aims to address the various health and environmental concerns regarding how we used to manage faecal matter in the past. Momodu Conteh, a resident of Kolleh Town Community, shares that “when the vacuum trucks brought the faecal matter from households in the city, they used to empty their sludge contents right within the community, exposing all of us to health hazards.”

“This all began about 4 years,” Mayor Aki-Sawyer narrated, “with the sanitation sector working group at my office for the Transform Freetown programme. There were two sub-groups – one focused on sanitation and another focused on managing liquid and solid waste. Waste collection at the time had slumped down to zero percent. But we set ourselves a target to increase to 60%.”

FCC collected the wastes and began experimenting a process with a volunteer in the Sanitation Working Group, Walid Bahsoon, to treat liquid waste which ran for six months. FCC continued to engage partners and brought in FCDO. By May 2019 to October 2021, the Faecal Sludge Treatment Plant was constructed under a project that was funded by FCDO, and the operationalization funded by Irish Aid through GOAL Sierra Leone co-implementation.

Pius Nishimwe, WASH and Climate Change Coordinator, GOAL Sierra Leone stated that: “The plant is treating average of 12 trucks a day equivalent to only 21% of liquid waste generated in Freetown. So far about 5,000 trucks of faecal waste have been treat at the plant, processing about 36kt of sludge and translating into 780t of dewatered solid 780t of solids”.

Constructing the Faecal Sludge Treatment Plant only solved the problem of improper disposal of liquid wastes but then leaves FCC to consider the reality of what needed be done with that waste. In Sierra Leone 96.8% of the population uses firewood or charcoal for cooking and in Freetown, 83.3% of the households use charcoal as the main source of energy for cooking. With Sierra Leone’s first Faecal Sludge treatment plant operational, there was an opportunity to develop climate-sensitive, sustainable waste-to-energy sources that appeal to both the private sector and communities. It is to address this challenge that FCC approached UNCDF to propose this second project which aimed to create at least one prototype from waste–to–energy using the processed end-product from the Kingtom faecal sludge treatment plant and solid waste biomass.

With the purpose of assessing the market for the developed prototypes and population needs and preferences in terms of alternative sources of renewable energy (with focus on cooking energy), GOAL in collaboration with UNCDF conducted a study on end-product waste from the newly constructed Faecal Sludge plant and created three prototypes using the plant and solid waste biomass as an alternative, low-cost and more sustainable cooking energy, and viable commercial product. Since more than 88% of the population relies on wood, carbonized biofuel briquette was recommended for this stage of prototyping while piloting other existing technologies in the region including home biogas.

UNCDF under its Blue Peace Financing Initiative funded the study and the production of the prototype. Country Lead for UNCDF, Mohamed Al-Batayneh, stated “UNCDF is very pleased to support this project which aligns with our Blue Peace Program and our global drive to support climate-friendly initiatives. In addition to supporting FCC in the financing of 65 Water Kiosks and 15 Public Toilets, UNCDF looks forward to more innovative programs under its partnership with FCC.”

“Today what you see is collective action. From GOAL, to FCDO, to Bosch Foundation and now to UNCDF, we have been able to build something that shows massive potential,” Mayor Aki-Sawyer expressed. “We now collect 21% of Faecal Sludge in Freetown but we want to increase it to 60%. So we need more investment. We’ve won the Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge and need to provide alternative sources of energy to complement our Freetown-the-Tree-Town initiative which aims to tackle deforestation by planting a million trees across the city.”