New Kid on the Sanitation Block: Dioloto Madagascar
Left: SOIL EkoLakay container collection in Cap-Haitien, Haiti | Right: Dioloto Madagascar and Tatirano team members with container based toilet models
Join us in giving a warm welcome to Dioloto, a container-based sanitation service based in Fort-Dauphin, Madagascar, and the newest member of the Container Based Sanitation Alliance (CBSA) family! Although we’re located nearly half a world apart, Dioloto has drawn close inspiration from SOIL’s EkoLakay service to tackle the challenge of safe sanitation in Madagascar.
SOIL’s sanitation revolution inspiring global change
Dioloto’s founder, Harry Chaplin, first sparked an interest in container based sanitation after meeting Sasha Kramer, Executive Director of SOIL Haiti, at the 2019 Royal Academy of Engineering symposium in Mexico. At the time, Harry had just started a social enterprise, Tatirano, focused on empowering women through increasing access to clean water via rainwater harvesting. It was the first time he’d heard about Container-Based Sanitation (CBS), and the concept immediately fascinated him. The most encouraging aspect about CBS was its simplicity and feasibility in the context of southeastern Madagascar, which, like Haiti, is vulnerable to severe weather events and political and economic uncertainties.
“I remember Sasha speaking on a panel about young people entering the development space and starting social enterprises. Someone asked the panel, ‘What advice would you give to a startup?’ and Sasha said, ‘Don’t rush—you need to focus on the details.’ and that has always stuck with me.”
Fort Dauphin’s sanitation challenge
Fort Dauphin, a coastal city on Madagascar’s southeastern tip that is home to the people of the Antanosy tribe, is famed for its breathtaking natural beauty—lush green mountains, rainforest reserves, and stunning Indian Ocean beaches. Yet, within this scenic landscape lies a complex sanitation challenge. The city is essentially built on a sand dune, and similar to Cap-Haitien, it sits on a high water table, with homes that are densely packed together. As is also the case in Haiti, the majority of households in Madagascar rely on pit latrines—holes dug on their property—but these pits eventually collapse, become overused, or contaminate the water supply.
“As it stands, I think it’s fair to say that nearly 9 out of 10 people in Fort Dauphin lack access to a safe and comfortable toilet.”
Within this context, safe sanitation—specifically container-based sanitation—offers immense public health and environmental benefits for Fort Dauphin, just as it has in Cap-Haïtien. Dioloto’s team draws inspiration from SOIL’s success, recognizing the shared sanitation challenges, environmental factors, and cultural dynamics between the two cities.
The journey from water to sanitation
Harry has called Fort Dauphin home for nearly a decade—long enough to gain fluency in the Malagasy language and navigate notoriously nightmarish transportation logistics with ease. You can find Harry zipping around town between the Tatirano offices and public water kiosks, dedicating his time to researching and developing safe water solutions. An engineer by training, he’s collaborated with universities and research teams worldwide to design a diverse variety of appropriate technologies aimed at improving access to clean water in the long term such as rainwater harvesting and low cost home water storage jars under Tatirano’s Social Enterprise.
“In the sector we work in, local knowledge, skills and resources are often overlooked as appropriate solutions within the local context and community,” Harry explains.
During his time in Madagascar, Harry has watched organization after organization bring in solutions that are expensive to implement and ill-equipped to adapt to the local context—only to leave with limited long-term success. In recent years, several sanitation pilot projects have been introduced, but all have struggled to gain long term traction because they don’t address every part of the value chain from home service to value added products.
Dioloto is seeking to change that.
What is the meaning behind the name “Dioloto”?
The name Dioloto comes from the two Malagasy words “manadio maloto”. Manadio means “to clean” and maloto means “dirty”. To name the service, the team turned first to the community.
During the Dioloto pilot, 18 households using the initial models were invited to a two-day workshop at the Tatirano workspace to share their feedback and help shape the service’s identity. In a focus group, they discussed their thoughts on the toilet’s design and brainstormed potential names for the service. During this 2 day creation process, the Dioloto construction team, community liaisons, and families sat together, talked, drew up designs on whiteboards, and arrived at “Dioloto”. It translates literally to ‘clean the dirty’, but we promise it sounds much cooler in Malagasy.
How did you select the families for the pilot?
Dioloto is currently piloting its toilets and sanitation service in Ambinanibe, a fokontany (neighborhood) in Fort Dauphin, working closely with 18 households. Using similar methods that guide SOIL’s expansion, Dioloto chose a smaller rural area to start with, prioritizing its urgent need for safely managed sanitation and its potential to dramatically improve public health outcomes in that area.
Dioloto’s starting goal is to reach about 700 households within the first 18 months. Like SOIL, Dioloto aims to create a tipping point in the community where container based, safely managed sanitation becomes the norm.
Harry and his team identified families who were already active in community clean-up efforts—people dedicated to improving their surroundings. “We spoke with them directly, gauged their interest, and asked them to invite three friends who might also want to participate. Essentially, Dioloto’s pilot grew through word of mouth and by experiencing the urine diversion toilet at home and people saying - hey, I want that too.”
This grassroots approach helped build trust and engagement within the community. Thus, the beginnings of a sanitation revolution were born.
Adapting SOIL’s sanitation model to the context of Madagascar
Energized by the successful outcomes of SOIL’s circular sanitation model, Dioloto aims to establish a comprehensive sanitation chain in Fort Dauphin. This will include building toilets, waste collection, waste treatment, and creating valuable byproducts like compost, biochar and fertilizer.
Echoing SOIL’s approach, Dioloto’s service operates on a subscription model. Families pay a small monthly fee (estimated at $1.50–$2 USD) and in exchange they receive a toilet, toilet-paper sawdust or carbon-based cover material, and a container. Similar to SOIL, Dioloto sees the monthly fee not as a revenue driver, but as a way to foster ownership and commitment among participants. When containers need to be replaced, a collection team comes and swaps them out using a Dioloto service vehicle. Simple, logical, and with the power to transform communities and protect community health.
Waste collected from these households is then transformed using a variety of processes including traditional composting, vermicomposting and drying beds for carbonization, with careful monitoring of temperature and moisture levels to eliminate harmful bacteria during the thermophilic composting phase (learn more about how SOIL employs this method of composting here). Dioloto has invested heavily into testing the nutrient composition of this compost, aiming to produce a verified, high-quality, nationally certified soil amendment. Their composting research is led by a passionate Malagasy agronomist who is young, brilliant, and eager to see this sanitation model churn out rich compost to restore vitality to Madagascar’s desertified soils.
Turning poop into value via compost and charcoal
Looking ahead, Dioloto plans to expand beyond just producing compost by making biochar—a product that could help reduce slash-and-burn agriculture through providing an affordable market alternative to charcoal. Ideally, both compost and biochar would be sold in local markets, restoring the soil and reducing reliance on Madagascar’s endangered forests for charcoal, which is the primary source of cooking fuel in the country.
“Ultimately, the sanitation service is the foundation of our ambitions. By creating valuable end products, we hope to generate enough revenue to sustain and expand our work,” says Harry.
“In fact, as Tatirano grows, there’s potential for Tatirano’s water sales to also help cover Dioloto’s operating costs. People in Madagascar already spend significant amounts on bottled water and charcoal—if we can offer better, more affordable alternatives, we can create a sustainable business model that benefits both people and the environment, rooted in the same principles as what SOIL is doing in Haiti.”
Investing in a local dream team
Dioloto is assembling a dedicated team to drive its mission forward. Currently the Dioloto team is composed of four members: one composting expert, one community liaison, one collection worker, and one project leader. Central to the mission is winning the hearts and minds of people -community liaison-Lea, whose extensive experience with past sanitation projects brings valuable insight, is optimistic about the Dioloto’s chances:
“Container based sanitation is quite different and I think people are receptive to that. When I am working in Ambinanibe, many people who aren’t currently involved in the project - those who don’t already have a Dioloto [toilet] at home - ask me to be included so that they can use it at home too.”
Volatiana, the Chef de Projet was asked about her thoughts on the service.
“I think that there is a real opportunity for growth with Dioloto. I can see that there are already many people in town asking about the service and wanting to join. This makes it easy to spread the initiative, as the demand is there for families to want to have a safe toilet in their home.”
“Beyond providing toilets, we also want to help people understand the value of composting. We will start with the compost and then down the line move into biochar, but these acceptances will happen gradually. The quality of the products will speak for themselves. When they [the communities] see the benefits firsthand, they’ll be more likely to adopt the practice. Education and investment in knowledge sharing is key in making this transition.”
With a passionate team, innovative solutions, and inspiration from SOIL’s proven model, Dioloto is determined to transform sanitation in Madagascar.
Challenges to change and a whole lot of hope
Change is always met with some resistance,” says Harry. “There will be people who feel traditional practices should take precedence over something new. And of course, using a urine-diverting toilet is different from what most people are used to—there might be some hesitation at first.” SOIL resonates with this sentiment and has come up with creative demonstrations (click here see an example of Sasha showing off the 11 steps to using a urine-diversion toilet) to destigmatize container-based sanitation in Cap-Haitien.
Harry noted that younger generations of thinkers, engineers, and changemakers in Madagascar are changing the tide of what’s possible. He sees young people eager to launch their own initiatives, develop innovative solutions, and break the stigma around sanitation.
“There’s a lot of creativity and possibility brewing in the nation’s universities—and that change is where I see the most potential.”
Sanitation dreams and ambitions
Harry laughs when asked about Dioloto’s future ambitions—which are both large and plenty. “I have two thoughts about where this sort of sanitation enterprise could go. On one hand, we’re focused on proving the model with 1,000 households in Ambinanibe, and running the sanitation service alongside another income-generating activity to break even. If we nail that, scaling up to serve the entire city of Fort Dauphin isn’t out of reach—though that’s still a couple of years down the line.”
There’s also the long-term dream of public sector support. “It would be incredible if, one day, local government or international development funding helped cover the gap in public sanitation services. That might be a ways off, but it’s a nice thought.”
In the meantime, Dioloto is open to collaborations with existing services. “The commune in Fort Dauphin already has a latrine-emptying project and a waste treatment site outside the city. If we scale up, it’d be great to partner with the enterprise running that site and integrate container-based sanitation as an option. Especially since latrine-emptying services aren’t accessible to the community we’re starting with.”
Sh*t happens (especially when you’re dealing with toilets)
Of course, building a sanitation service comes with its share of humorous moments. Dioloto’s headquarters—nicknamed by the team as the “GooglePlex” for its sleek, open-plan design—regularly hosts tours and training sessions for other organizations.
“We’ve got a workshop out back and a beautiful bamboo-finished dry separating toilet that we’re pretty proud of—it’s basically a high-end luxury toilet.”
But not everyone gets the concept right away.
“During a training session with some masons that visited the Dioloto/Tatirano office, one guy lifted the toilet seat, got spooked by what he saw, and decided it was safer to use the shower instead. Poor Madame Zia—our collector—walked in later, only to find an unexpected surprise on the concrete floor! Needless to say, we now have a strict induction process for anyone using the composting toilets.”
Keep an eye out for more on Dioloto
In the coming year, Dioloto plans to launch their first large-scale pilot project. With passion, innovation, and a little humor, Dioloto is proving that safe sanitation is not only possible in Madagascar but also a key to unlocking imaginative solutions. In the way that creativity and drive has unlocked a world of possibilities for the transformation of waste in Haiti, we are excited to see how Dioloto’s container-based sanitation journey unfolds.
