A different model for urban sanitation
How Fresh Life is working alongside government and communities to strengthen sanitation systems in Kenya
Across rapidly growing cities, sanitation infrastructure often struggles to keep pace with urban growth. In informal settlements, where services are limited and land, density and infrastructure present complex challenges, the consequences are particularly acute for children. Exposure to unsafe sanitation and poor hygiene contributes to disease, environmental contamination and heightened risks to health, safety and dignity.
Fresh Life was created to address this challenge through a model designed specifically for dense urban environments.
Operating across Nairobi, Eldoret, and Kisumu in Kenya, and more recently in Lusaka, Zambia, Fresh Life has installed approximately 9,000 container-based toilets across its network, providing around 330,000 people each day with access to safe sanitation. The model is built around a full sanitation service chain: safe and private toilets, daily waste collection and transport, and treatment systems designed to ensure waste is safely managed and reused. The network also supports more than 8,300 Fresh Life entrepreneurs operating sanitation businesses within their communities.
For Fresh Life, however, the work has never been limited to sanitation hardware alone.
Elizabeth Mururi of Fresh Life
“We focused not just on building toilets, but on the entire sanitation value chain: providing safe and private facilities, removing and transporting waste, and ensuring it is properly treated or reused,” explain Elizabeth Mururi and Wali Mwalugongo of Fresh Life. “As Fresh Life continued to grow, we also began asking how our learnings could extend beyond the places where we directly operate, and how we could help other organizations and SMEs deploy safely managed sanitation systems in their own communities.”
Wali Mwalugongo of Fresh Life
That evolution reflects a broader reality facing the sanitation sector. The challenge in many urban contexts is no longer solely whether alternative sanitation models exist. Increasingly, the question is how those models become integrated into the public systems responsible for delivering services at scale. Financing structures, procurement systems and regulatory frameworks are often designed around conventional sewer infrastructure, even where non-sewered sanitation may offer more viable pathways to safe service delivery. The wider sanitation sector continues to grapple with these systemic barriers, alongside persistent financing gaps and limited climate investment.
Fresh Life’s experience in Kenya reflects this complexity.
“One of our key challenges has been working with government, embedding into public systems and building acceptance for non-sewered sanitation,” Elizabeth and Wali explain. “When we started, we believed that if we could prove the model worked, government buy-in would follow naturally, but the process has been much more complex and non-linear than we expected.”
Building acceptance for container-based sanitation has required years of engagement with government systems, utilities and local stakeholders. Over time, Fresh Life has formalized partnerships and memoranda of understanding with governments through utility companies and across the cities where it operates, with ambitions to move beyond technical collaboration toward formal service contracts that position sanitation as part of broader public service delivery.
Alongside this work, Fresh Life has also helped test new financing approaches for urban sanitation. In 2024, the organization launched Kenya’s first results-based financing mechanism for urban non-sewered sanitation, linking funding to verified outcomes rather than traditional financing structures. That same year, it became one of the first sanitation organizations to generate carbon credits from sanitation services, creating new pathways for climate-linked investment in a sector that historically receives only a small share of global climate finance.
Fresh Life’s next phase focuses on how these lessons travel. Through partnerships with UNICEF Kenya, the UNICEF Sustainable WASH Innovation Hub and the UNICEF Spark Accelerator, Fresh Life is working to translate fifteen years of operational experience into practical tools and deployment models that can support wider adoption of safely managed sanitation systems. Fresh Life was selected as one of five global winners of the 2025 Spark Accelerator, which supports scaling through public systems, partner-led adoption and open models.
As cities continue to grow and sanitation pressures intensify, the experience emerging from Kenya points toward a wider lesson: innovation in sanitation depends not only on technology or infrastructure, but on the long-term work of building the policy, financing and government relationships that allow safe services to reach children and communities at scale.
