CHANGING TOILETS, CHANGING LIVES

Annual Report: 2021-2022

Greetings from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The years 2021 and 2022 were characterized by economic downturns caused firstly by the COVID lockdown in Mongolia, then by the logistical hurdles caused by tight lockdowns in China, and thirdly by the war in Ukraine. Mongolia, which borders only two countries, Russia and China, is living through a challenging period in our economic history, although we are a peaceful and politically stable democracy. 

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Our team Let’s Change Our Toilets continued our efforts while experiencing the lowest budgets in our six-year long campaign to change Mongolia’s toilets. We had to shrink our team to almost half the size of 2020, but we are proud to report that our public education outreach of 2021 and 2022 was annually just as high as it was in previous years, averaging four million views of our video contents each year. We had many excited community responses in changing behaviors, especially we saw increased participation by Ger (yurt) Area families in improving their toilets, grey-water systems, and restoring the degraded soil of their family land with the help of organic waste.

As many of you might already be aware, our initiative helps Mongolians discard their dangerous pit outdoor latrines and adapt safer, non-polluting indoor dry toilets. The initiative Let’s change our toilets has been conducting a series of non-profit and for profit hybrid activities including: discussing the issues with off-grid residential community members, selecting appropriate models for improvement, educating the public on basic science knowledge related to solutions, developing affordable solutions and making them available on market, And if the models are already available, promoting the models for free, as well as training vendors and users based on user experiences, developing IT solutions to connect vendors, users and traders, and providing visual guidance on the gathered knowledge.