Peter Hawkins worked on sanitation at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from 1976-1981, including the characterization of pit latrine contents and studies on pit emptying, in collaboration with Sandec at the Swiss Federal Water Resources Institute (eawag).
In 1982, he moved to Mozambique as a volunteer, working on urban sanitation and drainage, and then worked for the next 25 years as a consultant, mostly in Africa, including long-term assignments managing urban sanitation projects in Tanzania (1984-1989) and Ghana (1997-2002), as well as working in the water and sanitation sector in various Latin American countries, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
He returned to Mozambique in 2007 where he headed the World Bank/WSP team, and gradually took on a global role in the World Bank’s urban sanitation team, where he was instrumental in developing the faecal waste flow diagram (SFD) now widely used in urban sanitation. He left the World Bank in April 2017 and now works as an independent consultant on urban sanitation.
