an attempt at relavent news and commentary on water sanitation development and technology
Over the past few days people have talked about a new bout of cholera suspected in Chipinge District, Zimbabwe…WHO has looked into the cases and found…..nope it is not cholera……yep it is food poisining from some local brew!
Moral of the story –> Don’t drink the local beer
Was it this type of local beer?
Or was the local beer more like this?
A quick post for the week:
1. USAID has launched a website about Water Financing. The focus of this portal is to help partners of USAID comply with the 2005 Water for the Poor Act but they hope others can also learn how to incorporate notions of financial sustainability into their water projects…I have not had too much time to play around inside this site but it seems like an interesting idea. (One other thing I learned when doing a little research on the 2005 WftP Act is that there is a 2009 bill under consideration that would establish an office of water within USAID!)
2. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine got “hooked up” with an announcement of a 4.8 million dollar grant from the Gates Foundation to look into low-tech solutions for on-site sanitation. From the little detail I have seen, it seems like their funding will be used to research techniques for speeding up microbial processes in pit latrines…I look forward to seeing the results of this research!
3. The World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program came out with Guidance Notes on Services for the Urban Poor: A practical guide for improving water and sanitation services. I haven’t had a chance to read this in detail but wanted to send a link out for anyone interested….
Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, a self described “action sociologist”, has catalyzed the construction of over 1.2 million latrines in India – yes 1,200,000!!! Since 1970 Dr. Pathak and his Sulbah Sanitation Movement has helped change Indians’ perception of sanitation, and developed new and innovative technologies for both rural and urban populations. For his work on the Sulabh Sanitation Movement and its contribution to making sanitation a priority in India, Dr. Pahtak was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize this week. In case you wanted to know a little bit about his accomplishment/innovations, here is a short overview:
• Sulabh public toilet and bath facilities based on that system at 7500 locations, together serving more than 10 million people daily. These pay-per-use public facilities provide an economically sustainable, ecological, and culturally acceptable solution to hygiene problems in crowded slum communities and public places.• Optimized water conservation in the Sulabh Shauchalaya systems, requiring only 1.5 litres of water per use to flush, in contrast to conventional toilets that require a minimum of 10 litres. This has significant additional benefits for health and quality of life in water-poor regions.
• Environmentally balanced wastewater treatment based on a duckweed and fish raising (pisciculture) ecosystem that provides economic opportunities for rural poor communities.
• Several technologies that convert waste from Sulabh Shauchalaya toilets into biogas for heating, cooking, and generating electricity.
• The Sulabh Shauchalaya twin pit, pour-flush toilet system now in use in more than 1.2 million residences and buildings built by Sulabh. This technology has been declared a Global Best Practice by United Nations HABITAT and Centre for Human Settlements, and is now recommended by the UNDP for use by more than 2.6 billion people around the world.
(taken from here)
The Twin Pit Flush Latrine
This is only a short list….Check out their website for more info.
Honestly, this guy is an bonified sanitation guru. From the development of a sanitation museum (that is right) to a sanitation encyclopedia, this guy knows his shit (literally). Hopefully this prize will help highlight the Sulabh Sanitation Movement’s accomplishments and teach the world/WASH sector a thing or two about going to scale.
The Toilet Museum
Thanks to USAID’s Sanitation/Water/Env Health News Service service I get emails with a list of new abstracts every few days. Results from a new Solar Disinfection (SODIS) randomized controlled study came to my inbox today. This study, a collaborative effort between researchers in Bolivia, Switzerland, and the US (UC Berkley), sought to investigate the health impacts from a SODIS intervention through a cluster-randomized controlled study.
PLoS Medicine – August 2009 | Volume 6 | Issue 8 | e1000125
Solar Drinking Water Disinfection (SODIS) to Reduce Childhood Diarrhoea in Rural Bolivia: A Cluster-Randomized, Controlled Trial, Daniel Mausezah, Andri Christen, Gonzalo Duran Pacheco, Fidel Alvarez Tellez, Mercedes Iriarte Maria E. Zapata, Myriam Cevallos, Jan Hattendorf, Monica Daigl Cattaneo, Benjamin Arnold, Thomas A. Smith, John M. Colford Jr
Theoretically, SODIS can really have profound impacts on biological contaminants but no few large-scale rigorous studies have shown that it actually works in the field. Some of the common challenges include behavior change and proper use of the technology. It takes much more than a good technology to impact diarrhea prevalence and this study aimed to find out what could be achieved.
In the end the researchers found no statistically significant impact on diarrhea prevalence from the SODIS user group. Although this sounds depressing, there are some lessons that can be learned from this and applied to a subsequent attempt.
1. Study Design – Zulfiqar Bhutta, from the Aga Khan University, suggested in a follow up “Perspective” article that the study was designed to detect larger changes in diarrhea prevalence and the researchers may have been better off with a stepped wedge design. I am not sure what the best design would be (as I have not looked into this in depth) but if they expected lower prevalence reduction rates (which could still be important) I’ll bet the study design would have differed.
2. Focus on Behavior Change -Despite the intense software components to this study (conducted by an NGO Project Concern International) only ~30% of the SODIS group complied with the SODIS method. It would be interesting to learn more about why people failed to use the SODIS method and whether changes can be made to the education/software aspects of the project to improve uptake.
The full text of this article can be found here.
As many of you probably know, the World Water Week conference is currently taking place in Stockholm. This conference has a geographically diverse group of people from the water, sanitation, hygiene, and health fields. If you are interested in following the conference from afar here are a few ways to do it:
(1) The World Water Week Website has the programme of talks/workshops and many of the presentations and abstracts available for download
(2) Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and Akvo.org are broadcasting a series of interviews with people at the conference called WaterCube.tv. Watercube.tv seems to be uploading new clips VERY frequently and has had interviews with some really interesting people from all over the world.
(3) Try following some tweets here or here
I have blogged about different approaches used to encourage improved sanitation, but Uganda has again stepped it up (at least in theory). Today’s Daily Monitor reports that Kampala City Council is closing schools that don’t conform to city sanitation standards. While this may be a crucial step to show the importance of sanitation I have a few questions as to the cost vs. benefits of this approach.
-I wonder if these schools have funding to improve their own sanitation conditions. If not, as I suspect, how could they possibly deal with this?
-What happens to the children from these schools? Do they stay at home where the sanitation situation is presumably just as poor? Are they forced to go to another school farther away that probably has a dismal student to teacher ratio?
Apparently they have already closed three schools….What is next?
Ugandan Primary School Students Painting a Latrine with Health Messages
One of the many constant debates I have with myself is how to improve sanitation conditions for the rural and urban poor. Numerous 
incentive schemes and methods are in action throughout the world including grants, subsidies, use of by-laws, and education. While there may be anecdotal evidence of each methods’ merits, very few studies have actually demonstrated true sustained improvement in sanitation facilities and proper use. Wading through all of the options and trying to understand what has been done before can be a painful task for someone just jumping into this field. Thankfully the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) just released a new primer, Public Funding for Sanitation.
As this is a primer, there is not too much new information for those who have studied this issue, but this does have the types of schemes well laid out and described in a concise manner. I would recommend reading the case study boxes, which talk about a few programs I had never heard about, and the subsidy type definitions. In the end they talk about “Smart Financing” (a really nice buzz word, huh?) of sanitation which simply implies that one should use their brain before launching a massive sanitation scheme – duh. This really is a difficult issue to deal with and this primer should add to the discourse. Happy reading!
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) released a paper yesterday that gives a comprehensive view on the state of water and sanitation in urban areas of Malawi through the lens of meeting the MGDs. This paper, written by a Malawian Professor/Consultant, delves into the dismal state of urban poor in Malawi and essentially says that Malawi’s proclaimed achievements towards meeting the MGDs for Water and Sanitation are crap.
Official 2006 Malawi stats show that 96% percent of the urban population have access to potable water and 97% have access to sanitation. Based on the results of this (albeit not an academically rigorous) study this situation is NOT likely!! The real problem comes in defining what ACCESS really means…If it means that 5 households have a neighbor who has one primitive pit latrine that they can use once in a while – then may be that data could be plausible. If access to water is defined by having a public tap that charges double the standard rate for potable (and many times not even clean enough to be considered potable) water and is only available at best for 6 hours a day (and sometimes not for a week at a time) – then the data could be plausible.
After living in Malawi for almost 2 years in a very nice area of the capitol, Lilongwe, I cannot believe this data. Even in my posh neighborhood, we had days where no water flowed from the tap and other days where the water was brown. If Malawi cannot provide reliable access to the wealthy, who are willing to pay anything for their water, how could they possibly claim to adequately serve the poor.
Malawi’s poor governance is surely to blame for this dismal situation but the international community and agencies like UNICEF also need step up. UNICEF continues to pour money into WASH projects in Malawi and has not been able to strengthen the corrupt broken system within the Ministry of Irrigation and Water Development (and MoH). They have focused on spending their own money and meeting arbitrary goals (often times set by their donors) while letting the bureaucrats take them (and their money) for a ride. Instead of focusing on drilling as many boreholes (regardless of location) as possible (with little investment for O&M), buying ArcGIS for each District Water Officer, and other marginally beneficial endeavors – UNICEF must step up , use their weight as the lead UN agency for water and sanitation, and try to honestly strengthen the system. Why would UNICEF and others support false data about the Water and Sanitation situation in Malawi? They too want to look good, right? They don’t want to press the government too hard, right? Make them think? Hold them to more rigours standards for data collection? (ok ok enough UNICEF ranting for now but I promise to justify some of these claims in a future post)
Beating the MDG targets for Water, huh?
Here are a few interesting quotes from the paper:
“the policy to subsidize tariff to kiosks (MK44/m3) [in Blantyre] with the view that the poor should pay less for water is not achieving the intended results as the poor in the low-income area (kiosk customers) are paying three times (MK150–175/m3) more than the recommended tariff”. (Malawi Government, 2007c:75)
“Sanitation is under-emphasized in relation to water supply, despite the recognition of the inseparable link between them. Water supply is approached as an investment, while inadequate sanitation is regarded as an issue requiring increased education on hygiene behaviour. For
example, a sanitation marketing strategy has been developed to promote on-site sanitation, while for water supply an investment planning document 77 was prepared”
