Sanitation Video Contest

Thanks to all who entered the USAID Environmental Health Sanitation Video Contest. There were nearly 30 excellent entries and 5 of these were selected to be featured on Sanitation Updates. One of these will be featured each day on Sanitation Updates and below are links to the videos.

Also included are links to some excellent sanitation videos by BBC and Vanguard. We welcome any comments or suggestions you may have,

Jay Graham, USAID Environmental Health Advisor
jgraham@usaid.gov

1: Making It Easy: Sanitation Marketing in Cambodia
Date – 2010
Length – 9 min. 38 sec.
Producer/Summary – Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) – This video highlights a Sanitation Marketing Project that is being implemented by the international NGO IDE (www.ideorg.org) in Cambodia. Unlike conventional approaches to sanitation improvement, which are often subsidy-driven and overlook the market as a driving force to sustainable sanitation, the current approach, highlighted in this video, focuses on local market-based solutions and the sustained behavior change of sanitation practice within communities.

2: Informal Sanitation Entrepreneurs in Nairobi
Date – 2010
Length – 9 min. 55 sec.
Producer/Summary – Africa Interactive –  This video highlights the difficult working conditions of sanitation entrepreneurs in peri-urban areas and demonstrates the importance of professionalizing the work and financing this critical business sector.

3. The STUN Urine/Dry Fertilizer Project in Nepal
Date – 2010
Length – 5 min 46 sec
Producer/Summary – EAWAG – The STUN project, operated in co-operation with UN-HABITAT Nepal, examines the feasibility of making money from human excreta. The video shows how to convert source-separated urine into a dry fertilizer product called struvite. Struvite is an excellent fertilizer that can be precipitated from urine with only the addition of magnesium. Working in the Kathmandu Valley, with the community of Siddhipur, the STUN project has assessed the social, economic, and technical feasibility of producing struvite at the community level.

4. Marketing Sanitation in Rural East Java
Date – 2010
Length – 6 min. 18 sec.
Producer/Summary – Water and Sanitation Program – In Indonesia, where rural sanitation coverage remained low, at under 40%, for decades, sanitation has suddenly become a profitable, fast growing business. This video features small-scale sanitation entrepreneurs serving households in Indonesia’s East Java province, one of the most densely populated places on earth (38 million people). The video highlights the importance of sanitation champions and creative approaches to generate demand for sanitation, in addition to efforts to improve the sanitation supply chain.

5.  Health is Wealth
Date – 2008
Length – 12 min. 31 sec.
Producer/Summary – WaterAid – This video highlights effective community-led approaches to sanitation in Nigeria that improve sanitation by cultivating a sense of intolerance for open defecation and its effects, raising community expectations for improved sanitation. The approach emphasizes social norms and peer pressure and uses simple, visual methods to make obvious the spread of fecal-oral contamination – highlighting the fact that community members are literally eating each others’ “shit.”

Selected sanitation videos by Vanguard and BBC

The World’s Toilet Crisis
Date – 2010
Length – 44 min.
Producer/Summary – Vanguard – Vanguard correspondent Adam Yamaguchi travels to India, Singapore and Indonesia to understand why people don’t use toilets and what’s being done to end the practice of open defecation. When human waste isn’t contained or flushed down the toilet, it’s everywhere — in streets, open fields and, most dangerously, in the very water people drink. Adam investigates how countries are trying to solve an epidemic that few people want to talk about — the world’s toilet crisis.

BBC Earth Report Series – Community Led Total Sanitation in Bangladesh (3 Parts)

These three videos make up a short documentary about the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach, an innovative methodology for mobilizing communities to completely eliminate open defecation and take their own action to become open defecation free. It shows projects in Bangladesh and interviews with one of its pioneers Dr. Kamal Karr. In Part 3, Dr. Karr shows how investments in CLTS often lead to positive spillover effects that can help communities tackle other problems.

– Community Led Total Sanitation in Bangladesh (Part 1 of 3)
Date – 2010
Length – 10 min.

– Community Led Total Sanitation in Bangladesh (Part 2 of 3)
Date – 2010
Length – 6 min

– Community Led Total Sanitation in Bangladesh (Part 3 of 3)
Date – 2010
Length – 5 min. 10 sec.