WASHplus Weekly: WASH and Household Energy Entrepreneurs

Issue 72 September 28, 2012 | Focus on Entrepreneurship in WASH and Household Energy 

This issue contains some of the latest news and announcements about the role of entrepreneurs in providing water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and household energy products and services. This includes several winners of the Social Entrepreneurs 2012 award by the Schwab Foundation and USAID support for commercializing hand washing and establishing markets for cookstoves in Haiti. Also included is a link to cookstove market assessments by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which provide suggestions for removing barriers that prevent the creation of a cookstove market for more than 20 countries.

• Link to Weekly

The business of the honey-suckers in Bengaluru (India) – new IRC publication

A new IRC paper explores some contributions being made by honey-sucker tanker operators — that renders a small-scale sanitation service informally and within the private sector — on waste (faecal) extraction and, in some cases, reuse. Operating outside the legal framework of waste management, this paper provides preliminary insight into the limitations and potentials of the ‘honey-sucker business’ as a sanitation service model, based on selected experiences in Bengaluru (India).

Making sanitation subsidies effective: an IRC summer debate

By Carmen da Silva Wells

Every year, diarrhoea kills more children in developing countries than AIDS, malaria and measles combined (Pruss-Ustun 2008). Sanitation subsidies are a common tool used to motivate households to construct toilets. This seems an obvious response: many who lack access to sanitation are extremely poor and the potential public health benefits of universal access to safe sanitation are immense. But what is a subsidy? All programmes have some form of subsidy – so the question is HOW to use them effectively.

On the 11th of September, IRC debated the pros and cons of sanitation subsidies. The debate started with short presentations for and against sanitation subsidies. After that, discussions shifted towards a common definition of a subsidy and improvements to ensure subsidies contribute to sustainable services.

Cash Rewards Spur Poor Communities to Pay for Sanitation Projects

Cash Rewards Spur Poor Communities to Pay for Sanitation Projects | Source: by Nicole Wallace, Philanthropy.com – Sept 11, 2012

An international aid charity is taking an unorthodox approach to helping people in Cambodia and Vietnam improve sanitation and hygiene: It asks beneficiaries to help pay for the construction of latrines and hand-washing stations, but then gives them cash rewards when they get results. The effort will now spread, thanks to a $10.9-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Children try out a new hand-washing station. (Photograph by East Meets West Foundation)

The East Meets West Foundation, in Oakland, Calif., works with local groups to provide hygiene education, train masons to build high-quality latrines, and broker low-cost loans that families can use to install latrines and hand-washing devices. Families receive a $10 rebate to help offset construction costs after an independent group has verified that the latrine is in place.

Communities also get incentives: They receive cash awards to be put toward public-works projects, such as roads and sanitation facilities in schools, when the percentage of households that have latrines and hand-washing devices hits 30 percent, and the communities receive more money when those rates reach 95 percent.

George Washington University – Global Partnerships for Healthy Homes Initiative

The Global Partnerships for Healthy Homes Initiative (GPH2I) is a multi-disciplinary research initiative launched by the Institute for Corporate Responsibility in partnership with The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services and Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. It brings together faculty and students from the three schools to conduct research in developing and managing innovative approaches to environmental health issues.

• GPH2I Brochure, pdf

OUR VISION – GPH2I aims to help develop healthy living GPH2I environments – including access to safe water, low-cost sanitation, improved hygiene, and reduced indoor air pollution – through the integration of research and action. Our goal is to maximize disease prevention and quality of life in communities and households through carefully researched and designed interventions that result in benefits that persist beyond the life of projects.

OUR APPROACH - GPH2I uses applied public health, business and GPH2Ipolicy research to develop, test and evaluate holistic and multi-disciplinary interventions, which include public and private sector actors. With our combined expertise in environmental health, business model, and impact evaluation, our approach integrates action across a variety of factors that affect the health and quality of life of households and communities. This integrated approach allows us to address environmental health challenges effectively.

Illustrative research questions include:

• How to measure household willingness to pay and quantify household preferences for public health goods and services?
• How to design incentive structures to improve uptake and use of public health goods and services?
• How to design cross-subsidies and alternative financing to reach vulnerable households when direct cost recovery is infeasible?
• How to monitor and evaluate market-based intervention approaches?
• How to design effective public private partnerships?• How to monitor and evaluate impact of public private partnerships?

SWASH+ Website Launch – 6 Years of School WASH Research Have Come Together!

From: Julie Straw, MPH
CARE USA Water Team

SWASH+ is an action-research and advocacy project focused on increasing the scale, impact and sustainability of school water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions in Kenya. Since September 2006, SWASH+ has collaborated with teachers and students in 185 primary schools in four districts in Nyanza Province, Kenya to identify challenges and analyze innovative solutions for sustaining school WASH. The project’s randomized controlled trials and numerous sub-studies have resulted in a compendium of research publications, one-page research summaries, stories from the field, photo essays and short films now available for the public on the new SWASH+ website.

Six years of research was not conducted to simply share findings among academics and non-government organizations; from day 1 the project was designed with a strong advocacy-for-policy-change to reach successful implementation of school WASH throughout Kenya. The Government of Kenya has been a key contributor and the ultimate target audience for the lessons and recommendations from the SWASH+ project.

This research-based advocacy approach has led to wide-spread change across Kenya. SWASH+ research directly contributed to the Kenya’s Ministry of Education decision to double funding for school WASH ($840,000/year) with potentially more to come.  This increase makes a difference in whether or not a school is able to purchase consumables such as soap, WaterGuard for treating water, and latrine cleaning supplies – thus affecting student wellbeing and attendance. Research also brought national attention to the menstrual hygiene needs of young women in Kenya, resulting in Kenyan government allocation of $3.4 million for sanitary pads for school girls this year. SWASH+ research also impacted the adoption of new curriculum and…(want to read more? Check out the new SWASH+ website)

Join the Sanitation Marketing Community of Practice

Welcome to the Sanitation Marketing Community of Practice!

Are you a WASH practitioner currently working on Sanitation Marketing activities? Do you find yourself struggling to find others you can talk to about the practical issues you face – like how to work with a marketing agency, support a small business or design a new low-cost product? Are you thinking about starting a sanitation marketing program, but don’t know where to start?

Why a Sanitation Marketing Community of Practice?

As you know 2.5 billion people still lack access to basic sanitation and this has devastating impacts on the lives and health of people and communities.  At this rate the sanitation target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) may not be met until 2026, making it one of the most off-track targets in many countries of the world. To address this sanitation crisis, it is now clear that programs focused on latrine construction will not be enough. New approaches like Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) have proven that communities can be motivated to change their sanitation situation – but that the first step is triggering behaviour change.

SHARE – Small-scale finance for water and sanitation

Small-scale finance for water and sanitation, 2012. SHARE.

• Full-text, pdf

This report identifies ways in which governments and External Support Agencies can increase access to finance for small-scale WATSAN providers, by channelling public funding to support the market and leverage private sector financing. The ultimate objective in doing so is to increase access to services for poor households, who either invest in the services themselves or rely on small-scale providers.

Productive sanitation – the honey suckers of Bengaluru

Indigenously developed honey sucker in Bengaluru (Bangalore), south India. Photo: Vishwanath Sankrathai

The dumping of untreated faecal sludge in urban areas has been described as an ecological time bomb. In African cities, typically less than 15 percent of residents are served by centralised sewage systems, and figures for Asian countries are not much better. Yet there is a growing number of examples where re-use of urban faecal waste as fertiliser is linking city households and peri-urban farmers in a chain that provides both affordable sanitation and soil fertility. A recent study of sanitation services provided in Bengaluru (Bangalore), in southern India, suggests such approaches deserve to be legalised and scaled up within an appropriate legal framework to ensure the safety of farm workers and consumers.

Read the full article in the New Agriculturist, July 2012

Performance of a novel, on-site, worm based sanitation system for peri-urbanvenvironments

Assessment of the performance of a novel, on-site, worm based sanitation system for peri-urbanvenvironments, 2012.

• (Full-text) pdf

F. F. Kassam

This study evaluates how effective a worm based sanitation system is in reducing the rate at which solid waste accumulates and at how worms can improve the quality of effluent by reducing pathogen levels and the concentrations of harmful chemicals. Both pilot scale laboratory reactors and a prototype Tiger Toilet were fed with human faeces on a daily basis and the accumulated solid wastes in the systems were weighed. Every week microbiological and chemical analysis was carried out on the effluents of the systems, as well as of a control reactor without worms, which provided a point of comparison.

Over the course of the investigation, the worms processed the waste and reduced the total accumulated solids by 90% in the laboratory reactor and by 70% in the prototype reactor. Pathogen levels were reduced by an average of 99.79% and 95.45% in the laboratory reactor and the prototype reactor respectively, over this period. There was a reduction in the levels of harmful chemicals, such as COD, which reduced by around 94% in both reactors. This investigation verified that the Tiger Toilet technology provides an effective, low cost, low tech solution to less economically developed countries’ sanitation problems.