Welcome to the final module on sanitation technologies. It is about emerging technologies and new ongoing developments in the sector. In the last few lectures we tried to give you an overview of the entire spectrum of sanitation technologies. We could not present all technologies that exist, but our focus was on those that are fully developed and that have been proven and tested in field applications. However, in addition to those established technologies, there are several innovations that have moved beyond laboratory phase and are currently being implemented in the context of low and middle income countries at a scale that shows great promise for the future. In recent years many organizations around the world started to work on technology and business model innovations in the entire chain between user interface designs and end use technologies. Other research focuses on further developing the already well-known and widespread technologies to improve their performance. There are so many exciting and promising initiatives and projects that there is no way for me to list them all here, I just want you to be aware that the list of technologies that we presented in this course is not the end of the story. It may just be the beginning. If you are interested to learn more about what's going on in this dynamic sector, I can highly recommend you to check out the online forum of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance, SuSanA, and in particular the section on innovative sanitation science and technology. The SuSanA is a great platform for learning and sharing, and by signing up on the forum you can continue the discussion beyond this course and exchange your knowledge and experience with more than 4,000 sanitation enthusiasts from all over the world. Some further reading on the emerging sanitation technologies is provided on pages 166 to 169 of the compendium and in the chapter <i>The Way Forward of the FSM book. As described also in that book chapter, a lot of research and development work still needs to be done in order to achieve adequate sanitation for all, and it will take time to overcome the bottlenecks that still exist. One major challenge is that innovation and transformation processes in this sector are quite slow, because, among other reasons, centralized network infrastructure typically stays in the ground for several decades, and alternatives are still too little known. This prevents innovative sanitation technologies from being taken up at scale. I am convinced that through our joint collaborative efforts we can overcome the knowledge gap and bring sanitation innovations a step further. In the following modules Elizabeth Tilly will show you how the technologies of different functional groups can be combined into logical systems.