Ostella

Main consultant

Dr. Elisabeth von Münch

Dr. Elisabeth von Münch has a background in process engineering and a PhD from the University of Queensland in Australia. She has 15 years of experience in the wastewater and sanitation sector, first on centralised treatment plants and since 2005 on low-cost sustainable sanitation systems. From June 2008 until October 2012, Elisabeth was the program leader of the program “Sustainable sanitation – ecosan” at GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH) in Germany, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). In that position she worked on knowledge management and dissemination of sustainable sanitation concepts with a focus on urban informal settlements. The team which she led managed the secretariat of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA), the SuSanA website and open discussion forum. Since November 2012 she works as an independent consultant for variouis clients.

In October 2014, Elisabeth became an active editor on Wikipedia and co-founder of the Wikipedia WikiProject Sanitation. The aim of this collaborative effort is to benefit the world by giving the general public and professionals in all areas that touch on sanitation topics (such as public health, infrastructure, water, agriculture, gender, environment, poverty, etc.) information which they can all read, appreciate, and respect, free of charge. In short, it is about improving sanitation-related content on Wikipedia.

Elisabeth has worked for many years in Australia, England, the Netherlands and Germany - as process design engineer, senior lecturer and program manager. She has carried out short-term assignments in Burkina Faso, Benin, Uganda and Morocco. She speaks English and German fluently, and speaks French well, too. She is married, has three children and lives in Schwalbach near Frankfurt, Germany. In her spare time she enjoys playing soccer in the local women's team.

Current clients

Previous clients

Links to websites that I am actively involved in

Examples of my presentations

Other videos and photos

  • Dry sanitation system at my house, 2009 (video clip)
  • Explaining the Separett urine diversion toilet at UNESCO-IHE in Delft, the Netherlands, 2007 (video clip)

My publications

  • Forty of my publications are available in the SuSanA library here 
  • Further publications are in my CV (available on request)