Plagiarism flushes sanitation paper

Just when another German minister is forced to resign after being accused of plagiarism, two less well-known sanitation scientists have been put to shame for the same offence.

Two scientists from India’s Center for Sustainable Technologies have had their journal article retracted after the publisher, Elsevier, discovered they had plagiarised a Swedish research paper.

Sanitation and nutrition

In the scramble for attention in post-2015 development agenda discussions, WaterAid and the SHARE programme are highlighting the role of WASH in combating malnutrition. “A successful global effort to tackle under-nutrition must include WASH” is the headline in their new briefing note.

Mentioned in the note, and of special interest, is the forthcoming Cochrane review on “Interventions to improve water quality and supply, sanitation and hygiene practices, and their effects on the nutritional status of children” (DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD009382).

In the wake of the WaterAid/SHARE briefing note, a new World Bank report on sanitation and stunting [1] is ”getting a lot of attention from our nutrition colleagues”, says Eddy Perez of the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) in an email.

Dealing with land tenure and tenancy challenges in water and sanitation services delivery

Providing water and sanitation services to the urban poor often takes place in contexts with complex formal and informal land ownership arrangements. Firstly, the people in most need of improved water and sanitation are often tenants, and this raises diverse challenges: for example, landlords may be unwilling to invest in better toilets. Secondly, improving water and sanitation services often requires land for construction of communal or public facilities, and land tenure again raises diverse problems here.

How can these challenges be overcome? Drawing on WSUP’s experience in the African Cities for the Future (ACF) programme, this Topic Brief gives an overview of this area, and discusses possible solutions. The Topic Brief also offers practical guidance for programme managers.

This Topic Brief is the first in a series of four, documenting learning from the ACF programme. Watch out for the following titles, which will be released over the coming weeks:

• Getting communities engaged in water and sanitation projects:
  participatory design and consumer feedback
• Designing effective contracts for small-scale service providers in urban water and sanitation
• Hybrid management models: blending community and private management

To view all WSUP’s publications, visit www.wsup.com/sharing.

Renewed research call for low-cost sanitation technologies in Bangladesh [deadline18 Feb 2013]

IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre announces a renewed research call for:

Low-cost sanitation technologies for areas with high water tables

This call is part of the BRAC WASH II programme in which EUR 1.5 million will be used for innovative research, tendered to consortia of leading European and Bangladeshi research organisations.

The planned duration of the research project will be 18 months.

The anticipated cost of the project is EUR 325,000. In addition there is EUR 50,000 available for piloting. (Separate budget needs to be included for this).

Download the BRAC Call Applicants Guide

Download the Application form

Application forms should be sent to bracactionresearch@irc.nl

The deadline for submission of full proposal application forms is: 18 February 2013.

Future research calls will focus on low-cost water supply technologies; Geo-referenced database for monitoring; menstrual hygiene management; and saline intrusion.

Please do not send requests for information or applications to the Sanitation Updates blog.

Conference explores faecal sludge management, a key link to up-scaling sanitation

Getting ready to access the pit for emptying, eThekwini , South Africa. Photo: Elisabeth von Muench, SuSanA

Since many experts believe that flush toilets and sewerage are unaffordable for the large majority urban and rural communities, faecal sludge management (FSM) is seen as a key link to up-scaling sanitation.

But do we need to reinvent the toilet or invent a sanitation industry? That was the concluding thought of Water for People’s Steven Sugden, one of the 100 or so presenters at the Second International Faecal Sludge Management conference (FSM2). Looking at all the presentations, the impression you get is that we need both better technologies and better business models.

FSM2 ook place in Durban, South Africa from 29-31 October 2012. The conference was structured around the following themes:

• On-site Sanitation as a Business
• Socio-political Aspects of On-site Sanitation
• Understanding On-site Sanitation
• Toilet Design for FSM Optimisation
• Pit Emptying – What are the Options?
• The How of Faecal Sludge Treatment
• Waste Not Want Not – Beneficial Use of Faecal Sludges
• Technology and Innovation
• Health Aspects of Faecal Sludges

All the presentations are available on the SuSanA website.

SEI and SuSanA to lead new sanitation learning & sharing platform for Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has chosen the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) to lead a new sanitation learning and sharing platform.

The Gates Foundation’s Sanitation Science and Technology Programme has over 80 projects. SEI and SuSanA have been tasked to share the results from these projects in an open public forum engaging a broad range of experts and the general public.

Over the next 15 months SEI will work with the Programme Grantees of the Foundation in order to broaden understanding and discussion about their work. The grantees will be encouraged to work through the SuSanA that has about 200 institutional members and some 2000 discussants on its Discussion Forum (www.forum.susana.org).

In August 2012, the Foundation gave a grant to the Water and Sanitation for   Africa (WSA) to set up the Africa Sanitation Think Tank (ASTT).

Related web sites:

• Gates Foundation - Water, Sanitation & Hygiene
• SEI – Managing Environmental Systems
• SuSanA
• IRC – Sanitation

Source: SEI, 09 Nov 2012

Preventing sanitation failure by using evidence-based behaviour change

Mass media campaign with loudspeaker rickshaw, Bangladesh. Photo: Eawag

Evidenced-based methods are more cost effective than traditional NGO awareness raising approaches to ensure sustained behaviour change in the WASH sector, says environmental psychologist Prof. Hans-Joachim Mosler.

Prof. Mosler

Two of his presentations on evidence-based behaviour change are now available online.  An accompanying guideline for behaviour change [1] was published in June 2012.

Mosler begins his first presentation with examples of failed sanitation and water projects. What they have in common is that they focus on hardware and neglect behaviour change. In one striking study, the construction of new school latrines actually increased health risks among girls because hygiene behaviour did not improve [2].

Sanitation surcharges collected through water bills: a way forward for financing pro-poor sanitation?

Market-driven models for sanitation in low-income areas are of unquestionable importance, but there is broad consensus that the market needs to be supported by some sort of public revenue stream. One approach to revenue generation is to include a sanitation surcharge within water bills.

This Discussion Paper is a situation review of sanitation surcharge systems in African cities, focusing on systems designed to raise revenues for improving sanitation in low-income districts. The review considers existing pro-poor surcharge systems in Lusaka and Ouagadougou; systems that cannot currently be considered pro-poor, in Dakar, Beira and Antananarivo; and the special case of Maputo, where there is ongoing debate about how a surcharge might be introduced. Lusaka’s model is of particular interest: could it be applied more widely to raise finance for pro-poor sanitation?

For more publications in this series, visit www.wsup.com/sharing

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?

Kenya – WASH in Schools Lessons Learned

Source – WASHfunders Blog, Aug 17, 2012

Editor’s Note: This guest post was authored by Malaika Cheney-Coker, the learning and influencing advisor of the Water Team at CARE USA. Her work includes support on internal and external communications, the application and use of monitoring and evaluation tools, and technical guidance on learning strategies and activities within partnership programs of the Water Team. In this post, Malaika discusses the implications of a school WASH project study on action-research projects.

In the summer of 2007, SWASH+, a school WASH project in Nyanza Province, Kenya, with a large and complex research operation, conducted a small study. The study was a simple identification of the recurrent costs needed to pay for materials and for labor to maintain and repair water containers, stands, taps, and to re-purchase soap and water purification items. Very different from the larger randomized controlled trials and studies being conducted by the project, this study  cost little and did not require a large research team (it was conducted by a graduate student over the course of a summer) or complex design and analysis. However, the findings of this simple cost research were immediately adopted by the Ministry of Education and resulted in a doubling of the Ministry’s Free Primary Education allotment for electricity, water, and conservancy — a budget line item that schools have traditionally used to pay for WASH costs.

Parent volunteer helps monitor school WASH conditions by ensuring soapy water is available for hand-washing, drinking water is treated, and latrines are clean. Credit: CARE / Brendan Bannon, Kenya, 2012

From this experience, the SWASH+ team gained some important insights into how action-research projects can achieve results:

• Various forms of inquiry are needed to produce and buttress an evolving story. The simple study on WASH costs was a logical next step after a study on the sustainability of a safe water systems pilot in 55 schools identified adequate financing as one of four domains of sustainability. A problem tree analysis also identified inadequate or poorly planned financing as a key threat to sustainability. Similarly, SWASH+ findings from a randomized controlled trial on the effects of school WASH on pupil absence provided evidence for one of the potential impacts of improved school WASH (an average of six days less of absence for school girls) and helped make the case for increasing investments in school WASH.
• Research needs to be made available to policymakers in practical terms. The budget for operations costs drafted by SWASH+ offered specific and practical recommendations that could be more readily adopted than a general injunction to the Ministry of Education to increase its funding.
• To make research available in practical terms, action-research organizations need to be adept at canvassing entry points and opportunities for influence. A SWASH+ review of the national school WASH strategy draft revealed that the cost estimates related to school WASH seemed arbitrary. By having had cultivated relationships within the Ministry, SWASH+ was able to point this out and suggest that these numbers be revised using figures provided by the research.