Harnessing the wisdom of crowds – Open discussion forum helps to answer many sanitation related questions

The idea for this open discussion forum on sanitation came from our experience that when you want to buy a new car or have a question about your baby’s teeth: where do you get advice from? You put your question into a search engine like Google and you end up reading other people’s postings on a discussion forum. Usually, those questions and answers prove to be very helpful.

The same mechanism can hold true for a discussion forum on sanitation issues. This is why the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) secretariat developed a new discussion forum which was launched in July 2011. The forum is open –  as opposed to some existing closed fora which require a login even just for reading. Today, the SuSanA forum already has 930 registered users, 40 topics, nearly 1000 views for the most popular topics, and some topics have attracted up to 20 replies.

All postings are readable by everyone and searchable by search engines like Google and Yahoo. A broad range of topics are covered such as sanitation systems and technologies, health and hygiene, CLTS, school sanitation, sanitation systems for special conditions, menstrual hygiene management, SuSanA working groups and announcements and many more.

All registered users can contribute to the forum by creating new discussion topics or by responding to the posts of others. The option to create a user profile, including a passport-style photo, is available. The user can also attach additional documents and photos to his or her posts.

For people who like to receive postings via e-mail, it is also possible to subscribe to a daily e-mail alert service of new posts simply by leaving your e-mail address here. Alternatively or in addition, one can subscribe to specific categories or topics after logging in and thereby follow specific discussions.

Here are four examples of very active discussion threads so far:

• Faecal sludge management;
• Mobile sanitation systems like peepoo bags in Kenya or a new urine diversion toilet pot in Bangladesh;
• Menstrual Hygiene Management, including the Ruby Cup business idea in Kenya;
• Progress of SuSanA working groups:

To view the discussion forum or to obtain your own login for writing on the forum, please click here.

For further information or questions please contact the SuSanA secretariat (susana@giz.de)

Winning the race: Sanitation in rapidly-growing towns in Southern Africa

This is a call for participants and contributors to an in-depth learning and sharing session on sanitation in rapidly-growing towns.

IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, together with UCLGA, WIN-SA and AusAid, are hosting a Learning and Sharing Workshop around this crucial topic in November 2011. The 2 day session, to be held near Johannesburg (in the week of 7 November), will explore proactive, tangible ways to deal with pressing sanitation issues in towns experiencing rapid growth in Southern Africa.

SADC participants (eligible countries in green here) are invited to apply to participate or contribute to the workshop – which discusses practical and pragmatic ways to seize the current ‘window of opportunity’ that exists in rapidly growing towns. The application deadline is 5 October 2011.

For more information and an application form go to: www.irc.nl/page/66412

Rwanda in the fast lane, sanitation field visit confirms

Around 30 percent of the national budget of Rwanda is made available to district authorities. This high share makes Rwanda a front-runner in Africa, Stephan Klingebiel and Timo Mahn, two German banking specialists write in the June 2011 edition of Development and Cooperation, Vol. 38.2011:6. In only a few years, the country has considerably improved its public financial management. And the reform impetus started in the country itself. Donors helped to mobilise reform forces, but no one questions Rwanda’s leading role.

A similar drive can be reported on sanitation. ‘From the ruins of years of war and genocide, Rwanda has moved to improve household access to hygienic sanitation  facilities faster than in any country in Sub-Saharan Africa””, writes Nitin Jain in the July 2011 Getting Africa to meet the sanitation MDG: Lessons from Rwanda.

And from my four days in Rwanda during the AfricaSan3 Conference I can confirm this reality. I had talks with a national planner who finances district level Training of Trainers on Sanitation and Hygiene, district level officials who were trained and Community Mobilisers who trained village level Community Health Workers. I also visited and talked to the Community Hygiene Club in Rwanagala umudugudu (village) in Kazence cell, in sector Ntamara, in district Bugesera, Eastern Province, some 30 kilometres out of the capital Kigali.

Handwashing facility at road toilet, Photo IRC/Dick de Jong

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UNESCO-IHE and partners get US$ 8 million Gates grant for urban sanitation education and research

UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education and partners have been awarded a US$ 8 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will be used for postgraduate sanitation education and research with a focus on solutions for the urban poor in sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia. This 5-year capacity building and research project was developed by Prof. Damir Brdjanovic, Professor of Sanitary Engineering at UNESCO-IHE and his team.

“This is probably the largest research and postgraduate education project targeting sanitation for the urban poor ever conducted,” Prof. Brdjanovic said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced this grant when they unveiled their new sanitation strategy at the 2011 AfricaSan 3 conference in Kigali, Rwanda on 19 July 2011.

India: “edutainment” health camps focus on preventing diarrhoeal disease

A US-based health research firm, Abt Associates, has organised a series of diarrhoea prevention camps in low-income settlements in cities of Lucknow, Kanpur and Varanasi. The camps took place between May and July, the peak period of diarrhoeal outbreaks.

Saathi Bachpan Ke logo

The camps are part of the ‘Saathi Bachpan Ke‘ (Friends of Childhood) programme, funded through the USAID-India Market-Based Partnerships for Health Project.

Puppet theater teaches camp participants the importance of washing hands with soap, ORS use and purifying water to prevent and manage diarrhea. Photo: Abt Associates

The Abt team has produced an “edutainment” package for parents, caregivers and children participating in the camps. They are taught important life-saving behaviors – from washing hands with soap and purifying water to rehydrating children suffering with diarrhea. Key messages are reinforced through puppet shows, interactive games and quizzes.

Presentations and demonstrations are provided by physicians and other program supporters including manufacturers of soap, water purifiers, and oral rehydration salts, and public sector partners.

Related web site:  USAID India - Market-based Partnerships for Health (MBPH) – Saathi Bachpan Ke

See a promotional video of “Saathi Bachpan Ke” initiative on USAID India’s Facebook page.

Source: PTI / Deccan Herald, 07 Jul 2011 ; Abt Associates, 06 Jul 2011

Governance in Urban Sanitation, e-Learning Course, UNITAR, 25 April – 01 July 2011

The goal of the course is to enhance the capacity of local decision-makers and sanitation professionals to make the most enlightened decisions and investments in the area of urban sanitation. It provides analytical tools to understand the financial and institutional framework of the sanitation sector, taking into account the needs of urban poor communities.

Organised by: United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)
Fees: US$ 400 per participant
Application deadline: 20 April or when course is fully subscribed
Estimated Learning Time: 5 hours/week (total : 50 hours)
Language: English

Download Course Flyer

Register online at www.unitar.org/event/sanitation2011

Save the Children asks: Do You Know Your Dirty Words?

Save the Children is asking children and adults to test their knowledge of dirty words. The global humanitarian organization released a series of fun videos on YouTube this week taking on four dirty words: germs, toilets, worms and dirty water.

Through the “Dirty Word” videos, the agency seeks to highlight the water, sanitation and hygiene conditions at schools in developing countries, and simple solutions that are helping children stay healthy so they can stay in school and learn.

The series, narrated by Seung Lee, Save the Children’s director of School Health and Nutrition, includes interviews with school children in Nepal, who have seen changes among their peers and at their school since simple health, sanitation and hygiene measures were put in place.

The video series includes:

Dirty Word: Germs – In poor countries around the world clean water and soap at school are hard to come by. And when children do not wash their hands, they get sick. Each year, children miss 272 million school days because of diarrhea. The video highlights the installation of child-friendly hand-washing stations in schools to help stop the spread of preventable diseases.

Dirty Word: Toilets – In many developing countries around the world, school children have limited or no access to a bathroom during the school day. Two out of three schools in poor countries do not have decent toilets. The video highlights the installation of child-friendly toilets in schools for boys and girls so they have a private and convenient place to go the bathroom.

Dirty Word: Worms – In poor countries around the world, contracting worms is a risk faced daily by many children. About 400 million school-age children in the developing world have worms. The video highlights how de-worming medicines and iron supplements keep children healthy.

Dirty Word: Dirty Water – Across the world, many children have little or no access to clean drinking water at school. Almost 1 billion people lack clean drinking water globally. The video highlights the installation of hand pumps and the testing of local water sources for bacteria and poisons.  

ACCESSanitation – Accelerating City to City Exchange for Sustainable Sanitation

ACCESSanitation is a three-year project (December 2009 – November 2012) implemented by ICLEI with funding from the European Union. It aims to to promote and initiate local sustainable sanitation solutions in a total of ten cities – five in the Philippines and five in India – thus improving health conditions, fostering the local economy and increasing food security. As well as benefiting the participating local authorities, the project will also increase awareness on the importance of sustainable sanitation for poverty alleviation among local stakeholders in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Project partners are: ICLEI European Secretariat, ICLEI Africa Secretariat, ICLEI Southeast Asia Secretariat, ICLEI South Asia Secretariat, Ecosan Services Foundation (Pune) and Xavier University, Cagayan de Oro City.

The principle stages of the project are:

• Creation of an inventory on relevant national policies and strategies in target countries
• Identification of 10 cities in target countries to participate in the project
• National training courses with selected municipalities in target countries
• Three phases of local application including initial rapid assessment of the sanitation situation in participating cities, priority setting, development of action plan and implementation of solutions
• Regional knowledge exchange and follow-up workshops
• Final conference
• Publication and dissemination of project case studies

Second Partner Meeting, Cape Town, 11-13 May 2010

During this meeting, the ICLEI South Asian and South East Asian partners presented and inventory of sanitation programmes being undertaken in their regions.

The technical partners Ecosan Services Foundation from India and Xavier Institute from Philippines presented the training programme on sustainable sanitation to be held in the project cities.

On 14 and 15 May 2010, the project held the first Advisory Board meeting with representation from the Bremen Overseas Research and Development Association (BORDA), International Water Management Institute (IWMI), University of KwaZulu-Natal, UN-HABITAT, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) and Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI).

ICLEI South Asia launched a call for Expressions of Interest for cities in the Indian subcontinent to participate in the ACCESSanitation programme. The call closed on 15 April 2010.

ACCESSanitation contact at ICLEI European Secretariat: Barbara Anton, barbara.anton@iclei.org

More information: ICLEI South Asia – ACCESSanitation

Blogging for nonprofit: IRC’s WASH Blogs

If you use WASH as a noun, rather than a verb, you gotta be working in the humanitarian field. WASH stands for “WAter, Sanitation and Hygiene”, one of the key sectors in the field of aid and development.

As with any nonprofit area, advocacy, information dissemination and project discussions are key to the WASH sector, so it was to no surprise I recently came across a whole bunch of WASH-related blogs (see bottom).

Now, it’s not the first time I stumble upon a series of interconnected blogs around a common theme. Often these blog projects start with a lot of enthusiasm, migrating into a general frustration about the amount of time it takes to update all of them.

They often end up in the waste bin labelled “Abandoned Blogs”.  Not so with the WASH blogs-“family”, which have been updated regularly since the past three years.

That stirred my interest, and I took the opportunity to have a chat with the man behind the WASH blog initiative: Cor Dietvorst, the editor of Source Weekly at the IRC (International Water and Sanitation Centre).

Blogtips: Cor, a social media professional, it seems?

Cor Dietvorst

Cor: (laughs) Well, I am an information specialist at IRC in Holland, where I have worked for over 25 years. I originally studied chemical engineering but my interest soon shifted via information management to providing news services.

At IRC I am also a member of the South Asia regional team and the Transparency and Accountability thematic group, with a special interest in the “right to information”. Recently I also facilitated a workshop on social media and web writing in Nepal.

Blogtips: “IRC” – Not the International Refugee Committee, as I know it, but International Water and Sanitation Centre… What is the IRC?
Cor: We are an independent knowledge centre dedicated to the field of water supply, sanitation, hygiene and integrated water resources management. We focus on improving  livelihoods for the poorest since 1968.
IRC has three main programmes: a core programme funded by Dutch development aid focusing on innovation and information services, and two large multi-country research/learning programmes funded by the Gates Foundation – WASHCost on life-cycle costs and Triples-S on sustainable water services.
We have over 60 staff mostly based in The Hague, and probably about the same number contracted in-country for programmes and projects. Our focus countries are Ghana, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Honduras

Blogtips: Where does social media fit within the work you do?
Cor: We work with a wide network of partners, so blogs are an easy way to keep everyone involved, and to dispatch information.

The more so as one of the key purposes of our organisation is to ensure water hygiene and sanitation services are not only delivered, but also maintained with the necessary skills. Thus training and capacity building is a key element for our long-term sustainability strategy. And once again, blogs are an easy way to assemble this information, stimulate discussions, and disseminate the information we collect. Better than a dusty library in The Hague! (laughs).

Read More-Blogtips

Terra Preta sanitation: re-discovered from an ancient Amazonian civilisation

Ecosan researchers have found inspiration in the Pre-Columbian black soil (Terra Preta) of the Amazon Basin for “the re-creation of the most successful sanitation system ever”. They will share their enthusiasm in the 1st Workshop on Terra Preta Sanitation with up to 60 participants from 27-30 September 2010 in Groß Ippener (near Bremen), Germany.

The recent discovery of the bio-waste and excreta treatment of a former civilisation in the Amazon reveals the possibility of a highly efficient and simple sanitation system. With the end product that was black soil they converted 10% of former infertile soil of the region into excellent land: Terra Preta do Indio (black soil of the Indians). These soils are still very fertile 500 years after this civilisation has disappeared. Deriving from these concepts, Terra Petra Sanitation (TPS) is in re-development [from the Workshop brochure].

Terra preta soils made by sanitation (adapted from Guenther 2007)

The 3-day Workshop is organised by the Institute of Wastewater Management and Water Protection, of the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH). Besides presentations, discussions and hands-on-work, the organisers promise that there “will be sufficient time for walking, jogging, music (bring your instruments!) or meditation”.

Resource persons are Prof. Dr. Ralf Otterpohl (TUHH), Dr. Jürgen Reckin (10 years of experience with Terra Preta and one of the wold’s best experts in garden plant varieties), Christopher Buzie (years of research in ecological sanitation and vermicomposting, networker in West Africa, TUHH), Torsten Bettendorf and Horacio Factura (Terra Preta Sanitation researchers at TUHH).

Prof Otterpohl and his colleagues have recently published an article on TPS:

Factura, H. … [et al.] , Bettendorf, T., Buzie, C, Pieplow H, Reckin J, Otterpohl R. (2010). Terra Preta sanitation : re-discovered from an ancient Amazonian civilisation : integrating sanitation, bio-waste management and agriculture. Water science and technology ; vol. 61, no. 10 ; p. 2673-2679. doi:10.2166/wst.2010.201

TPS includes urine diversion, addition of a charcoal mixture and is based on lactic-acid-fermentation with subsequent vermicomposting. No water, ventilation or external energy is required. Natural formation processes are employed to transform excreta into lasting fertile soil that can be utilised in urban agriculture. The authors studied the lacto-fermentation of faecal matter with a minimum of 4 weeks followed by vermicomposting. The results showed that lactic-acid fermentation with addition of a charcoal mixture is a suitable option for dry toilets as the container can be closed after usage. Hardly any odour occured even after periods of several weeks. Lactic-acid fermentation alone without addition of bulking agents such as paper and sliced-cut wood to raise the C/N ratio is creating a substrate that is not accepted by worms. [from the abstract]

See also a Powerpoint presentation by Prof. Otterpohl on Terra Petra Sanitation.

Download the Workshop brochure