Early announcement: Global Faecal Sludge Database

We are excited to share the news that a consortium of 12 laboratories world-wide and a team of developers are planning to launch an open access global database on faecal sludge characteristics later this year.

The database will initially contain 180 sets of analysis of 45 parameters of sludge samples taken from 60 locations in non-sewered areas of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. The analytical work will be executed following the methods as described in the book of Velkushanova et al., 2021. The initial database will contain approximately 5,000 data points. We are creating an innovative and interactive web-based application which will display processed data and information, and will allow users not only to download parts or the entire database, but also to upload new data to the database. Furthermore, we plan to create a package of downloadable apps that researchers and practitioners can use to process data from the database off-line. The database will include more than 45 different characteristics/ properties of faecal sludge and algorithms for data evaluation – thanks to incorporation of AI and machine learning, the missing data in the database will be synthetically generated, and new, unconventional relationships between sludge characteristics and other factors will be revealed.
The web-based application will be launched at the IWA World Water and Development Congress in Bangkok, later this year. We will keep you posted on this and several other parallel developments under this project.

This project is executed by members of the Global Partnership of Laboratories for Faecal Sludge Analysis under the umbrella of the Global Sanitation Graduate School (GSGS), is managed by IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, and is funded by Gates Foundation.