Jay Graham – Selling toilets in Cambodia: WaterSHED style

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.

Live & Learn Environmental Education – Grand Challenges Explorations Funding

Live & Learn Environmental Education Receives Grand Challenges Explorations Funding

• Contact: Rob Hughes, Project Manager & Lead Engineer, Live & Learn Environmental Education Cambodia, and Volunteer with Engineers Without Borders Australia, E: robhughes80@gmail.com

November 17, 2011, Phnom Penh – Live & Learn Environmental Education announced that it will receive funding through Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that enables researchers worldwide to test unorthodox ideas that address persistent health and development challenges. Rob Hughes and colleagues, together with the Ministry of Rural Development, will pursue an innovative global health research project, titled “Energy Recovery & Waste Treatment with Floating Biodigesters”.

Grand Challenges Explorations funds scientists and researchers worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Mr Hughes’s project is one of 110 Grand Challenges Explorations grants.

Cambodia: the Hands-Off Approach to Sanitation Marketing [video]

WaterSHED’s sanitation marketing program takes a “Hands-Off” approach to sanitation marketing. Pioneered in Cambodia, the Hands-Off approach recognizes that with creative social marketing, targeted support to local enterprises and the brokering of effective public-private partnerships, sanitation markets can grow without on-going external intervention. The Hands-Off program plays the role of catalyzing facilitator, using in-depth research into demand and supply to inform simple but effective strategies aimed at linking consumers to suppliers, and then staying out of their way.

WaterSHED is a Global Development Alliance led by the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health and supported by USAID’s Regional Development Mission-Asia (RDMA).

WaterSHED, which stands for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Enterprise Development, is a public-private partnership designed to bring effective, affordable water and sanitation products to market in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

WSP – Introductory Guide to Sanitation Marketing and Online Toolkit

Introductory Guide to Sanitation Marketing, 2011.
Print and Online Toolkit, by Jacqueline Devine and Craig Kullmann, Water and Sanitation Program.
Download Full-text (pdf) and view Online Toolkit

Sanitation marketing is an emerging field with a relatively small group of practitioners who are learning by doing. With an Introductory Guide to Sanitation Marketing and a companion online toolkit the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) seeks to contribute to the field by sharing practical guidance on the design, implementation, and monitoring of rural sanitation marketing programs at scale in India, Indonesia, and Tanzania, plus additional projects implemented in Cambodia and Peru.

The online toolkit includes narrated overviews, videos, and downloadable documents including research reports, sample questionnaires, and more.

Sanitation marketing, together with Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and behaviour change are the three core components WSP’s approach to scaling up rural sanitation, which also includes strengthening the enabling environment.

Cambodia: ADB plans US$ 27 million loan for rural water and sanitation

As part of the new Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) for 2011-2013 for Cambodia, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is planning a US$ 27 million loan and a US$ 800,000 technical assistance grant for the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation III project.

Source: ADB Country Operations Business Plan : Cambodia 2011–2013. June 2011. Download full plan ; ADB, Cambodia Announce $500 Million Three-Year Partnership Strategy, ADB, 07 Jul 2011

Brisbane WASH Conference 2011 presentations on hygiene and sanitation

Dr Val Curtis

“The most cost-effectiveness intervention for improving public health [is] improving hygiene promotion [and] without change in hygiene behaviour, we get none of the benefits of water, none of the benefits of sanitation”. This was one of the messages that Dr Val Curtis conveyed in her introduction to the session on “Behavioral change and social sustainability” at the WASH Conference 2011 (download audio of her presentation).

Some 224 conference delegates from over 100 organisations in 40 countries came to Brisbane, Australia for the WASH Conference 2011. Below is a selection of the presentations on sanitation – powerpoints + audio files – given on 16-17 May. (If you have never heard him speak before, don’t miss the presentation by CLTS-guru Kamal Kar). The presentation streams dealt with institutional, environmental, social and financial sustainability respectively.

Most of the presentations were about Asia, the focus area of conference co-organiser/sponsor AusAid. There were also a few presentations from Africa, a region where AusAid is looking to expand its WASH activities (see AusAid focus regions/countries).

WASH Conference 2011 presentations on sanitation

International

Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), Origin, Spread and Scaling up
Presented by Kamal Kar
Slideshare presentation | Download audio

Planning Behaviour Change: Chances and Challenges
Presented by Dr. Christine Sijbesma, IRC
Slideshare presentation | Download audio

Sanitation Marketing in Cambodia – 1st Place Award in Sanitation Video Contest

WSP – Making it Easy: Sanitation Marketing in Cambodia

Cambodian “Easy Latrine” wins international design award

A low-cost pour-flush latrines, especially developed for a project in Cambodia, has won a prestigious international design award.

The ‘Easy Latrine’, designed by Jeff Chapin while on sabbatical from IDEO, was one of three winners named Best in Show by the jury of the 2010 IDEA awards. The International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) is an annual competition organised by IDSA, the Industrial Designers Society of America.

Chapin designed the ‘Easy Latrine’ at the request of International Development Enterprises (IDE) for the Sanitation Marketing Project that was launched in Cambodia in early October 2009, under funding from USAID and the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP).

Users and schematics for the award-winning IDE Easy Latrine. Photos: Jeff Chapin and IDE Cambodia.

Village masons can build ‘Easy Latrines’ themselves from locally available parts. It consists of a pan, a bucket of water with a ladle, and pipes to connect a hut to a latrine buried in the ground. The latrine itself has three receptacles made of rings of concrete bound by the ash of rice husks — material that’s readily at hand and much cheaper than cement. Once a receptacle is full, it can be capped, and after two years, the sediment can be used as compost.

One latrine costs about $25 and more than 2,500 have already been purchased and installed by villagers. The aim to install 10,000 latrines by April 2011, all without subsidy as prescribed by the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach that the project is following.

Local producers are receiving training in sanitation and hygiene education, latrine production, and basic business and sales management. They are asked to invest a minimum of US$500 and produce three latrines per day.  A local mason—having seen his monthly income jump from US$50 to nearly US$400 in a matter of weeks—decided to invest more by purchasing another trailer for his motorbike in order to deliver more latrines to villages. He has also begun to sell his latrines to supply shops in the region as a secondary means of distribution. One supply shop is even selling the latrine core without making a profit, as they expect to earn their profits from the above-ground components that they will sell in conjunction with the core.

The IDEA jurors loved the clear thinking behind every aspect of the design of the ‘Easy Latrine’. Chapin and his team “understood how to bring the idea to the community, how the product would be made, and how it would be sustained,” says jury head John Barratt. “It’s an integration of strategy, service design, and product design.”

Source: Fast Company, 1 Jul 2010 ;  Aaron Langton, IDE Blog, 24 Jun 2010 ; WSP, Sanitation Marketing Takes Off in Cambodia, WSP, 2009