Queuing for the Gents in Mumbai. Photo: Hindustan Times

A slum resident from Mahim in Mumbai ended up killing his neighbour whom he felt had taken too long in a public toilet. Locals feel the tragic death could have been avoided if only the civic authorities had provided sufficient public toilets.

“We have no sanitation facility. Sometimes, basic human needs take over all rationale. and that is what happened today. It’s a tragedy that two lives were destroyed over such a petty matter. The authorities must take note of this,” said a resident.

The unfortunate incident took place on Saturday evening, 28 January 2012, when Simon Lingeree went to a public toilet near Devaji Govind Chawl, the slum where he lived. With Lingeree apparently taking too long, Santosh Kargutkar (40), who was in the queue, started banging on the door and abused him

When Lingeree finally came out, the two got into a fight. Lingeree was knocked unconscious and rushed to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead. A few hours later the police arrested Kargutkar and charged him with murder.

Source: Times of India, 30 Jan 2012

One WASH study (Water and Sanitation Program) calculates the economic costs to five East Asia countries due to losses related to poor sanitation.

On the IAP side, a study (Dix-Cooper) investigated whether early life chronic exposure to wood smoke is associated with children’s neurodevelopmental and behavioral performance. This seems to be the first study of its kind.

• Link

The President of the Republic of Liberia, Madam Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has finally signed the much talked about Liberia WASH Compact which was developed at the Multi Donor Conference on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) held at the S.K.D Spokes Complex in Paynesville, outside Monrovia last year May.

Liberian President, Madam Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

The Liberia WASH Compact is a product of the Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) Partnership aimed at ensuring that the Liberian population can have adequate access to safe water and improved sanitation facilities.

A release from the WASH Reporters & Editors Network of Liberia quotes the National Water Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion Committee under the leadership of the Public Works Ministry as saying President Johnson-Sirleaf who is WASH Goodwill Ambassador for Africa, signed the Compact last week.

The Liberia WASH Compact outlines the commitment to meet the MDGs challenges through partnership between Government, the Private Sector, Civil Society, Development Partners and the Media.

The President said recognizing that the challenges being addressed by the Liberian WASH Compact are shared by other Countries in the Region, the Government of Liberia will ensure the learning and successes of the Compact are disseminated in order to accelerate attainment of WASH objectives among Nations in the Mano River Union and ECOWAS.

President Johnson-Sirleaf believes that the Liberia WASH Compact will galvanize action in the WASH Sector and result in real improvements in access to safe water and sanitation for the people of Liberia.

The Compact builds on the development of several key WASH Sector Policies and Regulations which are essential for implementation to ensure that water and sanitation facilities are accessible, affordable and available to both rural and urban Communities.

Meanwhile, WASH Sector Actors in Liberia are commanding the President for the signing of the WASH Compact describing it as a demonstration of her commitment to the health and well being of the Nation.

The National Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion Committee under the leadership of the Public Works Ministry says the Liberia WASH Compact has been endorsed at the highest level and reiterates its continued support and commitment to the implementation of the WASH Compact and supporting the President in ending WASH poverty in Liberia.

The Liberian WASH Sector Actors welcome the move that only two days after her inauguration, Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of the Republic of Liberia demonstrated her commitment to the health and well being of the Nation by signing the Liberia WASH Compact. This endorsement is greatly appreciated by the WASH Sector Actors who wish to say, “Thank you,” to Her Excellency.

The WASH Sector Actors said the Liberia WASH Compact is a document that maps out four priority areas which will ensure that citizens of Liberia have access to safe, clean water and improved sanitation facilities.

According to them, these are in the form of the following commitments for sector stakeholders to establish and strengthen the institutional capacity of the sector, ensure equity and prioritized service provision, develop a monitoring system and improve the financing mechanisms.

The WASH Compact was developed by a team that included representatives from Government Ministries, Civil Society, Development Partners, UN Agencies and the Private Sector.

The Liberia WASH Compact provides a clear action plan which, with the coordinated response of the WASH Actors and the President’s endorsement, will result in increased efforts to improve water and sanitation facilities for the citizens of Liberia.

The WASH Sector Actors in Liberia are meanwhile encouraging everyone to read the signed Liberia WASH Compact available at www.wash-liberia.org.

The signing of the Liberia WASH Compact follows almost two months of intensive advocacy by the Liberia CSOs WASH Working Group for the President to sign the Compact.

The advocacy was done through series of WASH Crisis Talks around the Country, during which time the citizens challenged and urged the Liberian President to sign the Liberia WASH Compact in the interest of the State and people.

At one of the Crisis Talk Programs in Western Liberia, citizens of Gbarpolu County called on the Liberian Chief Executive, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf to sign the Liberia WASH Compact, which they believe is the first step towards addressing coordination, governance and financing challenges facing the Sector.

The Gbarpolu County WASH Crisis Talk organized by the WASH Reporters & Editors Network of Liberia (WASH R&E), “a Member of the Liberia CSOs WASH Working Group”, pointed out that the signing of the Compact will boost the Liberian WASH Sector faced with fragmentation, inadequate funding, policy limitation and data challenge which continue to undermine the Sector.

Source-NL-AID

The responsibility for sanitation in Asia is fragmented over different agencies, and in most cases the priority given to sanitation is low. Therefore more leadership and political will is needed to make sure that organisational structures function, that plans with good intentions become a reality on the ground and that resources go to the right places. While leadership for sanitation is needed at all levels, it’s most urgent at sub national level, in districts and provinces, because it’s there where the actions take place.

This is the outcome of an email discussion [1] of the WASH Asia Dgroup platform held from 9 August to 9 September 2011. The discussion was moderated by the SNV Asia knowledge network and IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, and involved 120 WASH practitioners from 5 different countries in Asia.

After the Dgroup discussion, a regional workshop [2] was organised around the same topic in Surkhet, Nepal, from, 13 to 17 September 2011, followed two days later by a discussion meeting [3]  co-organised by  the Ministry of Physical Planning and Works (MPPW) of Nepal.

Table on Leadership Roles from the Asia Workshop report

The Dgroup discussion is the third on rural sanitation and hygiene. The first discussed “Performance Monitoring of Sanitation and Hygiene Behaviour Change” [4] and the second was about “Rural Sanitation Supply Chains and Finance” [5]. All topics are learning components of the Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All (SSH4A) programme in Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Viet Nam and Cambodia. This programme is funded by the bilateral aid agencies of Australia (AusAID), the United Kingdom (DFID) and The Netherlands (DGIS) and private donors. SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, IRC and local partners in the five countries are implementing the SSH4A programme, which is running from 2008 to 2015.

[1]  Governance for rural sanitation and hygiene : overall summary of Dgroup discussion : 9th of August- 9th of September 2011. Read full summary

[2] Asia Workshop Governance for Rural Sanitation and Hygiene : Surkhet, Nepal,  September 13 – 17, 2011 : workshop report. Read full report

[3] Main points of the discussion programme ‘Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All’. Read full report

[4] Summary of the D-group discussion on performance monitoring. Read full summary

[5] Summary of the Dgroup discussion “Rural Sanitation Supply Chains and Finance”. Read the full summary

To find out more about the Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All (SSH4A) programme go to: www.irc.nl/ssh4a

Related news: Asia: Accelerated and sustainable progress in sanitation and hygiene is within our reach, E-Source, 05 Oct 2011

This issue of the WASHplus Weekly highlights 10 CLTS reports or studies published in 2011. The reports are reviews or evaluations of CLTS projects or programs in India, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Nigeria. One report (Kar) gives insights about features that have facilitated the rapid spread of CLTS in Africa and also discusses issues that limit its impact and dissemination. Please let WASHplus know if you have other recent resources on CLTS or if you have suggestions for future issues of the Weekly.

• Link

• Full-text (pdf)

Over the past 5 years CARE, Emory University’s Center for Global Safe Water, and Water.org, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Sustaining and Scaling School Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Plus Community Impact (SWASH+) project, have worked to achieve sustainable and national-scale school WASH services in Kenya through applied research and advocacy. The project tested a multi-armed school WASH intervention through a randomized, controlled trial with multiple policy-relevant sub-studies. Research results were then used to advocate for policy change to bring about sustainable school WASH services nationally. These efforts have focused on improving budgeting for operations and maintenance costs, improving accountability systems with a focus on monitoring and evaluation, and more effectively promoting knowledge of WASH through teacher training and the national curriculum.

Advocacy objectives were developed through a problem-tree analysis and stakeholder analyses. SWASH+ used Outcome Mapping to track progress against these objectives. Specific advocacy goals were to identify important policy intervention areas, work with policymakers to update knowledge and identify learning gaps and then act as a learning adviser to the relevant ministries.

Though the project has not achieved all advocacy objectives, it can claim some advances. Lessons for effective school WASH advocacy gained from the program successes and mistakes are as follows:
1) Having a rigorous evidence base creates large amounts of credibility with policymakers.
2) Significant time and follow-up are needed as well as having staff with appropriate skills.
3) The “ripeness” of the external policy environment is crucial and can make or break efforts to affect national-scale change. Successful advocacy initiatives avoid being insular, focus on the external policy environment at the outset, assess data needs and stakeholder roles and responsibilities, and set
reasonable objectives.

WSSCC, therefore is currently inviting suitably qualified firms/organizations to submit a proposal for the role of Country Programme Monitor (CPM) for the GSF grant programme in Senegal. Interested parties must submit their offer as per RFP instructions before 14h00 Geneva time by 13 February 2012. The contract duration is for 3 years with a yearly evaluation of the performance of services. For further information please click here.

The study found that online social media and news feeds were faster than, and broadly as accurate as, the official records at detecting the start and early progress of the epidemic, which hit Haiti after the earthquake in January 2010 and has killed more than 6,500 people.

[...]

The authors used HealthMap, an automated surveillance platform, to measure the volume of news media generated during the first 100 days of the outbreak, and they also looked at the number of ‘cholera’ posts on Twitter.

These informal reports were available online up to two weeks before official government reports were released, implying that they could be used to get earlier estimates of a disease outbreak.

James Wilson, executive director of the Haiti Epidemic Advisory System warned that social media sources like Twitter were often inaccurate and biased towards outbreaks in the capital Port-au-Prince where most of the journalists were based.

One of the study’s authors, Rumi Chunara recognised that informal data sources could be inaccurate but added that they could complement official data in an outbreak to get timely estimates of disease dynamics.

[1] Chunara, R., Andrews, J.R. and Brownstein, J.S., 2012. Social and news media enable estimation of epidemiological patterns early in the 2010 haitian cholera outbreak. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 86 (1), pp. 39-45. doi:10.4269/ajtmh.2012.11-059

Related news: Haiti: cholera victims demand UN compensation, Sanitation Updates, 08 Nov 2011

Related web sites:

• HealthMap – Haiti
• Haiti Epidemic Advisory System

Source: Daniela Hirschfeld, SciDev.net, 09 Jan 2012

• Full-text (pdf)

Menstrual hygiene management has long been taboo in many countries. During the learning events, participants talked about their efforts to break the silence, working with women and girls to ensure menstrual hygiene management needs are addressed through WASH programs.

Messages for WASH Sustainability

• Menstrual hygiene management is a critical aspect of WASH service provision and needs to be considered and discussed in a sensitive manner with communities and partners during project planning.
• Talking directly with adolescent girls and female teachers to understand their needs and preferences is essential when designing facilities for schools.
• There are opportunities to support small enterprise providing affordable locally made menstrual hygiene management products, generating income while providing essential services for women.

A new Learning Note, Vietnam: A Handwashing Behavior Change Journey for the Caretakers’ Program published by the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), describes the steps that were taken to design, implement, and monitor the program to aid program managers in developing other handwashing and hygiene promotion efforts.

Working closely with the Woman’s Union, the program’s activities in Vietnam reached 540 communes in 10 provinces. The project also trained more than 15,000 community motivators who reached more than 1.76 million women through interpersonal communications activities. As the Learning Note reports, these activities evolved over time based on information from the monitoring systems.

“As the target audiences move beyond knowledge to intention to handwash with soap, behavior change messages must also be modified,” the report found, adding that as the project progressed, opportunities arose to “fine-tune the interpersonal communications activities based on feedback from the field and from the household monitoring data.”

WSP has worked with local and national governments to implement the Global Scaling Up Handwashing Project in four countries: Peru, Senegal, Tanzania, and Vietnam. Learning Notes on the behavior change journey in Peru, Senegal, and Tanzania are also available (see Related Content below).

For more information on the Global Scaling Up Handwashing Project in Vietnam, please contact Nga Kim Nguyen at wsp@worldbank.org.

 See Related Content:

• Global Scaling Up Handwashing Project (brochure)
• Introducing FOAM: A Framework to Analyze Handwashing Behaviors to Design Effective Handwashing Programs
• Peru: A Handwashing Behavior Change Journey 
• Senegal: A Handwashing Behavior Change Journey
• Tanzania: A Handwashing Behavior Change Journey

• Full-text (pdf)

Chris Elbers, et al.

The One Million Initiative of the Government of Mozambique aims at supplying access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation for one million people. The program has constructed hundreds of new boreholes and implemented trainings on sanitation in communities from three provinces. To evaluate the program, a panel survey design was set up with a baseline in 2008, a midterm in 2010 and an end-line in 2013. The survey covers interviews with 1600 households, focus group discussions about the community and water points in 80 clusters in 9 districts. To our knowledge this is the first rigorous evaluation of such a large scale program in the water and sanitation sector.

This paper summarizes the findings of the baseline and midterm surveys in terms of health impacts, latrine ownership and the use of improved water sources. Our results indicate that the water point intervention had a sizeable impact on the use of improved water sources and on the health outcome of children under 5 but no impact for older individuals, while the sanitation component of the program had a strong impact on latrine ownership and health outcome for older individuals, and a limited impact on hand-washing with soap and the use of improved water sources when it was available in the community

Here is their list:

Philanthropedia will highlight the top 8 high-impact international non-profits working in water, sanitation, and hygiene through their blog and Twitter.

Philanthropedia, part of Guidestar, uses crowd-sourced research to rate charities and has so far covered 27 causes including International Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene.

Source: Philanthropedia Blog, 04 Jan 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: International WASH non-profits, Philanthropedia ]]> http://sanitationupdates.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/which-are-the-15-top-international-non-profits-working-in-the-wash-sector/feed/ 0 dietvorst http://sanitationupdates.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/washplus-weekly-focus-on-wash-and-iap-technologies/ http://sanitationupdates.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/washplus-weekly-focus-on-wash-and-iap-technologies/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:10:18 +0000 WASHplus http://sanitationupdates.wordpress.com/?p=6595 Continue reading →]]> Issue 37 January 6, 2012 | Focus on WASH and IAP Technologies

This issue of the WASHplus Weekly contains recent studies and manuals that review water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and indoor air pollution (IAP) prevention technologies. For WASH, these include a useful WASHTech review of technologies used in Africa, GIZ technology reviews of constructed wetlands and biogas, a new PATH ceramic filter, among others.

For IAP, PCIA Bulletins provide overviews of solar cookers and biogas, studies from Malawi and Nepal, and other resources. Please contact WASHplus if you have additional information on this topic or to suggest topics for future issues of the Weekly.

• Download/View

Assessing the impact of a school-based water treatment, hygiene and sanitation programme on pupil absence in Nyanza Province, Kenya: a cluster-randomized trial

Matthew C. Freeman, Leslie E. Greene, et al.

Objectives  There has been increased attention to access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) at schools in developing countries, but a dearth of empirical studies on the impact. We conducted a cluster-randomized trial of school-based WASH on pupil absence in Nyanza Province, Kenya, from 2007 to 2008.

Methods  Public primary schools nested in three geographical strata were randomly assigned and allocated to one of three study arms [water treatment and hygiene promotion (WT & HP), additional sanitation improvement, or control] to assess the effects on pupil absence at 2-year follow-up.

Results  We found no overall effect of the intervention on absence. However, among schools in two of the geographical areas not affected by post-election violence, those that received WT and HP showed a 58% reduction in the odds of absence for girls (OR 0.42, CI 0.21–0.85). In the same strata, sanitation improvement in combination with WT and HP resulted in a comparable drop in absence, although results were marginally significant (OR 0.47, 0.21–1.05). Boys were not impacted by the intervention.

Conclusion  School WASH improvements can improve school attendance for girls, and mechanisms for gendered impacts should be explored. Incomplete intervention compliance highlights the challenges of achieving consistent results across all settings.

Photo: WaterAid/ Abir Abdullah & ASM Shafiqur Rahman

SDC and WaterAid signed a grant agreement on 30 November 2011 for a 316 million Taka (US$ 3.84 million) three year rural WASH programme. SDC will provide 265.5 million Taka (US$ 3.23 million), and WaterAid the rest. If successful, SDC will extend support for another 3 years.

Most of the funding will go the ‘Promotion of water supply, sanitation and hygiene in hard -to-reach areas of rural Bangladesh’ project, which aims to provide safe drinking water to 500,000 rural people, latrines to 1.3 million and hygiene education to another 1 million people. WaterAid’s inclusion and climate change programmes will also benefit.

The second WaterAid initiative to receive support is the “Promoting Environmental Health for the Urban Poor (PEHUP)” project, which will be implemented in 3 major cities (Dhaka, Chittagong and Khulna) over a period of five years. Sida signed a cooperation agreement on 20 November 2011 to support this project with a 41 million Krona (US$ 6 million) grant, while WaterAid will provide 20% in match funding.

The project will provide WASH services to 340,000 urban poor people and mobile and public toilets for 1.6 million users.

Related news:

• Bangladesh: BRAC video shows importance of school sanitation for girls, WASH news Asia & Pacific, 08 Sep 2011
• Bangladesh: govt sanitation subsidy scheme ineffective, experts say, WASH news Asia & Pacific, 17 Aug 2011

Related web sites:

• WaterAid – Bangladesh
• SDC – Bangladesh
• Sida – Bangladesh

Source: WaterAid, 30 Nov 2011; WaterAid, 20 Nov 2011

• Top News – CLTS
• Nouvelle traductions françaises / New French translations:
• Lukenya Notes et Creuser, s’implanter et grandir-Introduire l’ATPC en Afrique
• World Toilet Day 2011
• New on the blog
• Research: request for help
• Other new resources on the website

Link to December issue (pdf)

• Link to Weekly

The following sanitation and hygiene technologies are included in the review:

• Bio-additives to pit latrines
• VIP latrines
• Urine diversion dry toilets
• Gulper
• Tippy tap

For each technology there is a description of the range of literature available on it, a concise description of the technology itself, a description of its application, a selection of interesting case studies, and an explanation as to whether the technology meets technical, financial, social and institutional success criteria.

Only two technologies met all four success criteria: hand dug wells and the India Mark II pump, and the latter only with the caveat that there was a functional maintenance system.

The least successful technology was the Playpump, which was only institutionally successful, and even that was only after significant pressure was put on governments by non-conventional donors. Jerry cans and the gulper only met one success criteria (technical success); they may meet other success criteria but further research is required. Most technologies were technically successful – the only failures were bio-additives and Playpumps. The other success criteria were met by roughly half of the technologies.

Core issues that WASHTech plans to take up further include the appeal of inappropriate technologies like Playpumps and Lifestraws to naive donors, and ways to get government approval for low-cost, locally managed technologies.

Full reference:

Parker, A. et al., 2011. Africa wide water, sanitation and hygiene technology review. (WASHTech Deliverable 2.1). The Hague: WASHTech c/o IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and Cranfield: Cranfield University. 93 p. : 1 box, 9 fig., 1 tab. Includes references.
Available at: http://wp.me/a1szDW-1o

The WASHTech project (2011-2013) is involving local partners in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Uganda to introduce a robust Technology Assessment Framework (TAF) that will assess the potential of new innovative technologies which may be used at decentralised level.

The partners involved in WASHTech are:

• Centre Régional pour l’Eau Potable et l’Assainissement à faible coût (CREPA) in Burkina Faso
• Network for Water and Sanitation (NETWAS), Uganda
• Training, Research and Networking for Development (TREND), Ghana
• Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana
• WaterAid in Ghana, Uganda and Burkina Faso.

European partners include IRC in The Netherlands (coordinating the project), SKAT Foundation in Switzerland, Cranfield University and WaterAid in the United Kingdom.

The WASHTech project is co-funded under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission’s Africa research programme.

For more information go to washtechafrica.wordpress.com

Sarah Palin. "Made by hand". Photo: Caganer.com

Sarah Palin and the Barcelona football team are among the new figurines in the 2011 Caganer.com collection. Hiding Caganers in nativity scenes is a strong Christmas tradition in Catalonia, Spain, dating back to the 18th century. The defecating figurines symbolise fertilisation, hope and prosperity for the coming year.

The traditional Caganer is portrayed as a Catalan peasant, but since the 1940s figurines of nuns, devils, the Pope, celebrities, historical figures, politicians, and both Spanish and British royalty have been introduced. In 2011, the first moving Caganers were launched.

FC Barcelona. Photo: Caganer.com

Web sites:

• Wikipedia – Caganer
• Caganer.com

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AlertNet) – On the fourth day of her menstrual cycle, Belkumari Paudiyal hikes for more than 20 minutes to the river below her village. She ties a petticoat round her chest and takes a cleansing bath, which signals that her life will resume as normal.

A woman washes clothes at Baidam Lake in Pokhara province, south west of Kathmandu, March 16, 2009. REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom

When Paudiyal, 37, is menstruating, custom demands that she be isolated from her family, and refrain from entering the kitchen, touching food or offering prayers.

“I prefer to walk down to the river as it provides some privacy to clean myself,” says Paudiyal, a resident of Paudiyalthok in Nepal’s picturesque Panchkhal Valley. “Otherwise there is the common tap which has no enclosed space. Trekking all the way to the river is the only solution.”

The traditionally fertile Panchkhal Valley in central Nepal, about 40 km (25 miles) east of the capital Kathmandu, has suffered an acute water shortage in recent years due to erratic rainfall, thought to be linked with climate change.

“(Rainfall) has become more erratic. Days are becoming hotter and nights warmer,” said Ajaya Dixit of the non-governmental Institute for Social and Environmental Transition-Nepal (ISET-N).

The main subsistence activities for the valley’s population are agriculture and animal husbandry. But a lack of reliable water sources is affecting many aspects of their lives, and women are bearing the brunt of changing weather patterns.

BACK SEAT FOR SANITATION

When water is in short supply, sanitation and hygiene tend to take a back seat. This is felt acutely by women who are subjected to chhaupadi pratha, a centuries-old custom of banishing Nepali women and girls from home for three nights while they are menstruating, as well as during and after childbirth, because they are considered impure.

Although outlawed by Nepal’s Supreme Court in 2005, the practice persists in rural areas. Women in poor villages in much of western Nepal must spend three days and nights in unhygienic places like cow sheds, regardless of the weather.

“We use old clothes called ‘thangna’ as pads when we are menstruating,” says Putali Mizar of Milepani village in Kavre district. “We can wash and rewash them with a little water… But to take a bath, trekking to the river is the only solution.”

The impact of prolonged drought on sanitation for women is an issue that is only now beginning to be addressed. ISET-N is trying to cater to women’s practical and strategic needs.

“We are building separate tap stands with enclosures for women and specific toilets for girl students in the schools,” said Dixit of the institute.

SPRINGS DRYING UP

The strain on women is also increasing when it comes to their daily chores. Paudiyal, like others in the valley, must now walk down to the river to fetch water for household needs and her buffalo. Each day she carries an average of 18 litres (4 gallons) of water on a “dhoko” (a basket tied to a hood).

Sugar cane used to be an important crop in the valley, but many farmers now cultivate vegetables instead, which are less thirsty. But, despite the fertile soil, it’s becoming harder to grow even vegetables with water in decline.

Paddy is cultivated only once a year rather than twice as in the past, and locals report that some crops such as tomatoes have failed completely.

Rainfall has increased since the peak of the drought in 2009, but residents remain unsure about how best to plan their livelihoods. Farmers are struggling to cope with the shifts in local hydrological characteristics.

“Some natural springs are drying (up) and some changes in the landscape are happening. People are responding to various kinds of stresses, and adaptation to drier seasons has become more complex in an otherwise water-rich area,” said Dixit.

For Paudiyal, the choices are stark. “I think we will sell off our buffalo now. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain one without adequate water to bathe and feed the buffaloes,” she said.

Dixit said her organisation is trying to encourage local people to diversify their livelihoods, and is training women to work as masons.

Teresa Rehman is a journalist and media consultant based in northeast India.

Clean” and “green” are words not usually associated with the streets of Lahore, but a garbage collecting business is changing the image of the Pakistani city.

And it is making millions of dollars in the process, by turning waste into liquefied petroleum products and fertiliser for farmlands.

• Link to video

Social enterprise Milaap has set up an online microlending platform that enables anyone to give a household loan for the construction of a toilet or water connection for the poor in India. Based in Bangalore, India, with its headquarters in Singapore, Milaap was founded in June 2010 by Sourabh Sharma, Anoj Viswanathan and Mayukh Choudhury.

Milaap copied the basic concept from Kiva.org, the first mirco-credit crowd funding platform to improve livelihoods of the poor, but expanded its scope to not only include micro-enterprises but also sanitation, water, health care, renewable energy and vocational training. Whereas banking restrictions prevent US-based Kiva.org from serving clients in India, Milaap was able to gain approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to enable lenders outside India (especially Non-resident Indians or NRIs) to lend to India through their website.

As lenders provide their loans interest-free, local microfinance institutions (MFIs) with whom Milaap has partnered, can charge lower interest rates of 12-18% or half the normal rate. After the loan has been repaid, it will be returned to lenders as Milaap credits which they can either withdraw or re-lend to other borrowers.

Currently two of Milaap’s field partners provide micro-financing for sanitation and water: Guardian in Tamil Nadu state and Sakhi Samudaya Kosh (SSK) and Sakhi Retail in the state of Maharashtra.

So far Milaap says it has raised US$ 140,000 for 650 users, while achieving a 100% repayment rate. The size of the sanitation loans being requested is 10,000 Rupees (US$ 212) for a new toilet, and half (US$ 106) to renovate an existing one. So far 61 loan request for toilets have been fully funded.

Web site: www.milaap.org/

The ideal Christmas present if you live in southern Africa. This 40 page guide has mostly life-size photographs of about 100 species of animals ranging from mice to elephants. The guide’s author Kevin Murray has apparently spent the last 18 years “walking in the bush throughout southern Africa, collecting and researching droppings”.

Order online from Random House Struik

The provision of sanitation services in low-income urban areas is one of the greatest challenges in development. Population growth in developing countries currently outpaces sanitation growth, especially in urban areas. Consequently, in urban areas where poor people reside, and where “formal” sanitation services are not available to them, they experience the compounded effect of serious economic disadvantages such as high risk to public health; a dirty and contaminated environment; no basic human dignity and safety for a large part of the world’s population, especially for adolescent girls and women.

Author Christine van Wijk

This paper catalogues existing financing models that can help the urban poor get access to complete sanitation services. It examines each model based on an analytical framework that comprises six criteria: applicability, simplicity, sustainability, scalability, pro-poor, and equity. It offers a recommendation for mixing financing mechanisms to meet the urban poor’s needs, and makes a plea for developing poor-specific and full-cycle specific plans for sanitation.

Although financing mechanisms include matched funding from national governments, the focus is on financing at and below city level. The contents give an overview of ways that the urban poor and others (e.g. national and local government, NGOs, external donors) have (co-)financed improved sanitation, and the advantages and limitations of each option.

The overview is subdivided by service level and builds on the work of IRC’s WASHCost project on sanitation service levels.

• Full-text (pdf)

Elizabeth Brainerd, Nidhiya Menon

This paper examines the impact of fertilizer agrichemicals in water on infant and child health using data on water quality combined with data on the health outcomes of infants and children from the 1992-93, 1998 99, and 2005-06 Demographic and Health Surveys of India. Because fertilizers are applied at specific times in the growing season, the concentrations of agrichemicals in water vary seasonally and by agricultural region as some Indian states plant predominantly summer crops while others plant winter crops.

Our identification strategy exploits the differing timing of the planting seasons across regions and differing seasonal prenatal exposure to agrichemicals to identify the impact of agrichemical contamination on various measures of child health. The results indicate that children exposed to higher concentrations of agrichemicals during their first trimester experience worse health outcomes on a variety of measures (infant mortality, neo-natal mortality, height-for-age z scores and weight-for-age z-scores). Disaggregated runs reveal that effects are largest amongst the most vulnerable groups – children of uneducated poor women living in rural India.

Download the guide as a PDF file or view online on the CRS web site
Also available in French

This technical do-it-yourself guide provides step-by-step instruction on building simple pit latrines. It was designed for use at the individual household level to assist families in West Africa who have already decided to build their own latrines.

The dialogue in the guide should be enacted by a facilitation team in the form of a skit followed by a debate. Each key step (placing the latrine, digging the pit, making the slab, building the superstructure) should be represented and followed by a discussion with the public, with responses and comments being provided for each step.

The guide is a product of the Global Water Initiative (GWI) programme, which is financed by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation (HGBF).

Illustration by Y. Parfait Bonkoungou in "Practical Guide for Building a Simple Pit Latrine"

Economic aspects of sanitation in developing countries.

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Van Minh H, Hung NV. Health Economics Department, Institute for Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Hanoi Medical University, Hanoi, Vietnam. Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute/University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

BACKGROUND: Improved sanitation has been shown to have great impacts on people’s health and economy. However, the progress of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on halving the proportion of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015 has thus far been delayed. One of the reasons for the slow progress is that policy makers, as well as the general public, have not fully understood the importance of the improved sanitation solutions. This paper, by gathering relevant research findings, aims to report and discuss currently available evidence on the economic aspects of sanitation, including the economic impacts of unimproved sanitation and the costs and economic benefits of some common improved sanitation options in developing countries.

METHODS: DATA USED IN THIS PAPER WERE OBTAINED FROM DIFFERENT INFORMATION SOURCES: international and national journal articles and reports, web-based statistics, and fact sheets. We used both online search and hand search methods to gather the information.

RESULTS: Scientific evidence has demonstrated that the economic cost associated with poor sanitation is substantial. At the global level, failure to meet the MDG water and sanitation target would have ramifications in the area of US$38 billion, and sanitation accounts for 92% of this amount. In developing countries, the spending required to provide new coverage to meet the MDG sanitation target (not including program costs) is US$142 billion (US$ year 2005). This translates to a per capita spending of US$28 for sanitation. Annually, this translates to roughly US$14 million. The evidence complied in this paper demonstrates that investing in sanitation is socially and economically worthwhile. For every US$1 invested, achieving the sanitation MDG target and universal sanitation access in the non-OECD countries would result in a global return of US$9.1 and US$11.2, respectively.

CONCLUSION: Given the current state of knowledge, sanitation is undeniably a profitable investment. It is clear that achieving the MDG sanitation target not only saves lives but also provides a foundation for economic growth.