Greetings from Cameroon where I am loving
life and still enjoying the fellowship! I
very much apologize for my delay in posting
videos but as you can imagine, things have
been quite busy! I'm quite happy to say that
things are slowing down. So, what's happened
in the past month? Um, a lot. I decided to
stop talking to NGO's and Government officials
because I got the impression that there was
a real need to take action in the sanitation
sphere and particularly in the toilet business.
While I was doing all my adventures you could
see that when you were trying to find a toilet
you couldn't find any which is a typical problem
in a developing country but here in Cameroon
people tend to resort to using "public toilets"
as in using the corner of the road to either
pee or defecate which is quite disgusting
and in terms of sanitation it has a lot of
public health concerns and implications. So,
I decided to tackle this issue by attempting
to design a what I want to call a portable
toilet. Essentially a toilet that would be
provided to whoever wants to rent it- you
would bring it and install it. That would
be one idea and the other idea I had was to
have an actually public toilet in different
strategic locations in the city of Douala
and I would explore that in the rest of the
country. So those are my two ideas. I decided
to focus on the second idea, because in terms
of logistics it was much easier to test whether
or not this was a good idea. What I did was
I drafted market research questions and a
survey that I gave to three segments of customers.
That would be my priority customers: moto
taxies, benskinners in Cameroon, as well as
taximen and Buyam Sellam. These are women
and men that usually sell on the corner of
the road. I decided to focus on these three
categories of people because these are the
people that are essentially always working
outdoors and they have no means to use to
use public toilet facilities. They would be
the first people in need of such toilets.
I decided to carry on market research focusing
on these people. It went very well and lasted
two weeks. People were very enthusiastic about
the project and I was very happy about that.
It was very intimidating at first but overall
it went very well and now I'm trying to write
up all my research, my results, that I'm hoping
to have done by the end of the fellowship.
So, that's about it! Thank you very much for
following!
You can see more about Iynna and the Frontier Fellowship at archgrp.org/s2015
