India, New Delhi: using Facebook and SMS to keep the city clean

With this photo on Facebook local resident Akshay Arora asks the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to "kindly send some one and get it clean this Toilet/Urinal". One day later on 7 April 2011, MCD replied: "Your complaint reference no. is 02/0704/SP"

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) launched its Facebook page in January 2011 and an integrated SMS service in March 2011 to enable public monitoring of garbage collection sites and public urinals/toilets in areas under its jurisdiction.The first experiences were positive as illustrated by the example of 22-year-old Piyush Goyal posted his complaint of garbage spilling over from the dump in his area.

On January 8, he clicked pictures of the seven dirty ones in South Delhi’s R K Puram area and posted them on Facebook. And the next day, he says, he saw the pictures of clean dhalaos uploaded by the MCD.

“There is lot of transparency through this way. The man who actually cleans it asked me why I uploaded the pictures. So the information is going from top to the bottom,” says Goyal.

MCD additional commissioner (engineering) Anshu Prakash added:

“This system is increasing transparency, fixing accountability and putting everything under public scrutiny. And none of us like to be ashamed in public. So people have started working at the bottom”.

Tippy Tap video wins YouTube award

A powerful video promoting handwashing with a simple tippy tap has won the 2011 DoGooder Nonprofit Video Award for Best Thrifty Video. The DoGooder awards are an initiative of See3 Communications and YouTube.

Watershed Management Group’s video “It’s in your hands” was among the top four of over 1,300 videos submitted by 750 non-profit organisations. The Watershed Management Group (WMG) is US-based non-profit with water and sanitation programmes in India, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mexico and Costa Rica.

“It’s in your hands” was filmed and directed by Andrew Hinton at Pilgrim Films.

DoGooder Nonprofit Video Award winners receive a US$ 2,500 grant provided by the Case Foundation and their videos got posted on the YouTube homepage on 19 March 2011. So far “It’s in your hands” has been viewed over 155,000 times.

WMG India and local NGO Grampari have launched a dedicated Tippy Tap web site: www.tippytap.org

Akvopedia Sanitation portal – now in Spanish

Through the invaluable support of our intern Niharika Joshi, our Sanitation Platform is now also available in Spanish. After we included the French version last year, this is another step on the road to making Akvopedia a true multi-language platform. We hope it will be useful to Spanish-speaking people around the world.

The new Spanish portal contains 54 detailed articles on a wide range of sanitation technologies. The material was adapted from the extremely useful Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies (2008, Spanish version here), written by Elisabeth Tilley and colleagues of Sandec, the Department of Water and Sanitation in Developing Countries at eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland. The authors eventually have plans to make that publication available in Swahili. I’ll look forward to that.

The Spanish version of the Sandec Compendium of Sanitation Systems, produced by Sandec.

Mark Westra is editor of Akvopedia, and is based in The Hague.

Southern Africa knowledge node on sustainable sanitation (SAKNSS) launched

The SAKNSS website provides information resources on sanitation in Southern Africa including country information, documents, links and images. The documents and  organisation links are browsable by type, country and theme. Organisations and companies can enter their details online in a contact registry.

The SAKNSS secretariat is based in South Africa and managed by the Water Research Commission (WRC) and implemented through the Water Information Network- South Africa (WIN-SA).

Go to the web site: www.afrisan.org

New Google tool sheds light on cultural history of sanitation

Sanitation has long been considered a taboo topic, but was this always the case and can we see cultural trends in interest for this topic? A new “culturomics” tool developed by Google reveals that first decades of the 20th century may have been the “golden age” of sanitation.

A team from Harvard University has teamed up with Google to crack the spines of 5,195,769 digitized books that span five centuries of the printed word with the hopes of giving the humanities a more quantitative research tool.

The Google Books Ngram Viewer, launched online December 16 and described in a paper in Science [1], allows Web users to query their respective areas of interest based on n-grams (a method of modeling sequences in natural language).

World Bank’s Water Sector Writing Contest on Wikipedia

The World Bank Wikipedia writing contest is an effort by the World Bank to engage with Universities for its Wikipedia Pilot Project (WPP). The competition is open to students currently enrolled at participating universities worldwide. First place contestants will be offered invitations for a week-long paid visit to the World Bank Water Week from 31 January – 04 February 2011 in Washington D.C.

The WPP project started in 2006 and maintains overviews of the water sector in a particular country or city, in the categories  water supply and sanitation, water resources management, integrated urban water resources management, and irrigation.  So far World Bank staff largely compiled these pages on Wikipedia, but now it is asking the broader academic community to participate in their preparation and maintenance.

World Sanitation Financing Facility launches web site and social media channels

The World Sanitation Financing Facility (WSSF) has launched a web site – www.sanitationfinance.org – and social media channels on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin to attract more technical and financial consortium partners. Formally established in 2009, the WSSF seeks to “increase people’s access to sanitation through collaboration and market-based financing solutions”. The WSFF stresses that it is a facility, not a fund, “which means that it seeks to identify the most effective, scalable, and sustainable solutions to the global sanitation issue and their related financing needs, but is not tied to any single pool of finance”.

This Wormy World: Global Atlas of Helminth Infections

A new web site – thiswormyworld.org – with maps showing the distribution and prevalence of worm infections in sub-Saharan Africa was launched on 17 August 2010.

These maps are the first of a series in the Global Atlas of Helminth Infections, an open-access information resource on the distribution of soil-transmitted helminths (roundworm, whipworm and hookworm) and schistosomiasis. Initial coverage is limited to countries in sub-Saharan Africa, but similar maps for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East will be available by the end of 2010.

By proving reliable, up-to-date maps of worm distributions, “This Wormy World” aims to help policy-makers and programme managers develop and implement national deworming programmes.

Updated List of Twitters – Water, Sanitation & Hygiene

Twitter, http://twitter.com, is a micro blogging platform which allows you to publish short messages of less than 140 characters through different mediums like IM, cellphones and the web.

Below are links to some WASH related Twitters and please let us know of others to add to the list:

• USAID Environmental Health
• CAWST
• Dick de Jong, H2O
• Dietvorst, IRC
• End Water Poverty
• Gates Foundation
• Global Water Challenge
• India Water Portal
• IRCSource
• IRC WASH
• Kiva Microfinance
• Ned Breslin
• Peepoople
• Potty Project/India
• Saniblog
• SuSanA
• Trees, Water & People
• Unesco IHE
• UNICEF
• WaterAid
• Water Advocates
• Water Charity
• Water Credit
• Water 4 Africa
• Water for People
• World Toilet

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).

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