Video Resource: What’s working in urban water and sanitation?

Water and sanitation services, as we all know, remain grossly deficient in slum districts of cities throughout the less-developed world.

Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) has produced a series of short videos relevant for everybody working to improve water and sanitation services for low-income urban consumers, highlighting ways in which African water utilities and other key actors are achieving real progress in this area.

The first four videos in the series are now available to watch on our YouTube channel and cover the following topics:

Emptying pits: a serious business
Paulinho, a small entrepreneur in Maputo, Mozambique, is moving into the pit emptying business. This video shows him at work.

Fix the leaks, serve the poor
How reducing non-revenue water (NRW) can free up water for low-income communities: experience from Antananarivo, Madagascar.

Surcharging for sanitation
Charging for sanitation through water bills. This video explores Lusaka’s sanitation levy system.

Connecting people
Tariff reform and social marketing as strategies for increasing household connections to the water network: experience from Maputo, Mozambique.

*The next set of videos in this series will follow shortly. Watch this space!

Emptying pits: a serious business

Mozambique – Effectiveness of Large Scale Water and Sanitation Interventions

Effectiveness of Large Scale Water and Sanitation Interventions: the One Million Initiative in Mozambique, October 2011.

• 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

Rose George: Why there’s a sanitation crisis – and what we can do about it

Rose George, author of the Big Necessity, writes about her visit to a village in Liberia in the Gates Foundation Blog. There she met a local pastor whose 9-month-old daughter Marie, had died in November 2010 from diarrhoea. Despite increasing attention for sanitation from organisations like the Gates Foundation and UNICEF, it is still not enough, she says.

Ask a Liberian how many children they have and they will answer carefully. “Six, living.”

In this village, the creek was everything. It carried away dead bodies in times of war. It brought animal carcasses. Its flow channeled the upstream villages’ excrement, human and animal.

The creek was drinking water, and washing water, and water that brought death. It was the water in which hopeful mothers, who had trekked four hours to the clinic for the free ORS salts, mixed the medicine.

They knew the creek water was dirty, and they still drank it. They had countless visitors tell them about hygiene and disease, and didn’t lack skills to build pits when they built their own houses. Still they used the bush for defecation. Still they tramped fecal particles back into their cooking and living areas, to be ingested and turned into diarrhea.

Sanitation, you see, is not easy.

Briefing Note on Mapping EU Support for Sanitation in Africa

The Briefing Note “Mapping EU Support for Sanitation in Africa”, published by the EU Water Initiative (EUWI) Africa Working Group, is based on a full study by WEDC in association with Hydroconseil. The purpose of the study is to obtain an overview of the status of the involvement of EU Member States and the European Commission in sanitation-related activities in Africa. It is anticipated that the findings of this work will have the potential to be used for both arguing for greater priority for sanitation within the international architecture and also for individual donors to use in discussing their own Official Development Assistance (ODA).

WASHCost reveals higher capital costs for sanitation than water, and high expenditure on soap

Most sanitation costs in rural and peri-urban areas are borne by households and when these are taken into account, the per capita costs are actually higher than those for water. State expenditure on capital maintenance, operation and maintenance, and direct and indirect support costs for sanitation is minimal in all four research countries of the WASHCost project. Households in Africa are spending surprisingly high amounts on soap. These are some of the findings that were presented at the IRC Symposium in The Hague on 16-18 November 2010.

The WASHCost project is working with partners in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mozambique and in the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh to collect and analyse cost data for water and sanitation services in rural and peri-urban areas. The overall aim is to build better cost data into country systems to increase the quality of services, especially targeting issues of poverty, equity and cost-effectiveness.

Sanitation costs and financing – presentations at IRC’s 2010 Symposium

The following papers on sanitation costs and financing were presented at the IRC Symposium 2010, ‘Pumps, Pipes and Promises: Costs, Finances and Accountability for Sustainable WASH Services’, held in The Hague from 16-18 November.

The economics of sanitation initiatives (ESI) for sanitation decision making in Southeast Asia. Author: Guy Hutton

This presentation discusses cost data from 5 Southeast Asian countries in various forms (by technology, by site/project, by hardware/software, by financing source, by timing, and under different infrastructure capacity use levels) to aid decision makers in intervention selection and to draw more general lessons about sanitation financing, efficiency and sustainability. Cost data were triangulated from household surveys, project or provider documents and local market surveys to estimate investment and annualized life cycle costs per household and per individual.

Full paper

CNN – The songs tackling Mozambique’s sanitation woes

(CNN) — In Mozambique, music stars don’t often sing about eternal romance or lovelorn relationships. Crooning lyrics like “Let’s wash our hands for the children to stay healthy, for the uncles to stay healthy, for the mothers to stay healthy, we build latrines,” Mozambican music icon Feliciano dos Santos is using his songs to educate people about the importance of sanitation and hygiene.

With his internationally-known band, Massukos, Santos spreads his life-saving messages to the most far-flung areas of Mozambique where scores of people still struggle due to lack of clean water and waste management systems.

“People sing the song because they like the sound and the rhythm but also because they know the message that we are passing and what we want to do,” dos Santos told CNN.

Link to video/complete article

Sanitation innovation in Mozambique

In Mozambique, an innovative programme overhauls sanitation practices

Source: United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)

‘Community Led Total Sanitation’ initiative

CHIBWE, Mozambique, 24 May 2010 – A circle of women dance to the beat of drums in the morning sun, a crowd of adults and children watching from under tall, leafy trees. After a lengthy roll of beats, the dancing stops and the circle opens to welcome visitors – a group of water-and-sanitation experts.

VIDEO: Watch now

In Chibwe village, located in Mozambique’s north-western Tete province, open defecation is common. With only about 39 per cent of the country’s estimated 22 million people using improved sanitation facilities, diseases like diarrhoea and cholera are common.

Today, however, the village is implementing a new ‘Community Led Total Sanitation’ (CLTS) programme with the help of UNICEF and its partners. Through CLTS, Chibwe residents will spearhead their own sanitation activities and learn how to keep diseases at bay.

Addressing sanitation

Following the welcoming festivities, UNICEF Mozambique WASH Specialist Americo Muianga met with Chibwe residents in a quieter setting.

“How do you say ‘faeces’?” Mr. Muianga asked. Giggles erupted from the crowd, along with the answer: “matudzi.” Pleased with the humour – which helps to lighten the mood – Mr. Muianga initiated a conversation about sanitation.

In villages like Chibwe, CLTS often begins with humour and a game-like exercise. Volunteers from the crowd draw a map of their village with sticks in the sand. White powder made from maize, or corn, defines the major landmarks: the school, the water point, the road to the nearest clinic and the local church. More volunteers are asked to stand at the point on the map where they live. Then they are given grey ash and asked to mark where they defecate.

“Calculate the quantity of excreta for each week, month and year for each household,” said Mr. Muianga. “Then you start discussing the quantity of excreta and where it goes.”

The tabulation is drawn on white butcher paper and held up for everyone to see – 84,720 piles of faeces annually from 93 households.

Awareness and action

The simulation – along with the shocking numbers – aims to help residents understand the scope of their sanitation needs. Villagers are asked to visit the real excreta sites, where they learn how human waste contaminates the local water supply and contributes to breeding grounds for flies and mosquitoes.

Along with its non-governmental partner, World Vision, and the Mozambique Ministry of Public Works and Housing, UNICEF is working to raise awareness of safe sanitation and hygiene in 18 districts across the country. The work is part of a programme known as the ‘One Million Initiative’ – funded by UNICEF and the Dutch Government – which aims to provide safe water and sanitation to a million people in Mozambique by 2013.

In Chibwe, Fatima Chipendo, a grandmother of nine children, has volunteered to set up a village sanitation committee. Sanitation is an issue close to her heart – her tenth grandchild died as a result of diarrhoea.

“It is important for us to improve the health of our children,” said Ms. Chipendo. While her house has one of the village’s few toilets, she added that everyone in the village should also have one.

Community participation

The sanitation committee is an integral part of the CLTS model. Unlike traditional sanitation programmes – which typically distribute outsides materials to build latrines – the committee helps design latrines that can be made using available materials, so that all families can afford to build one. The community-led model also helps latrines gain social importance and encourages innovation.

“When we develop programmes in which the beneficiaries don’t participate, they end up not being sustainable,” said Cadmiel Muthemba, Mozambique’s Minister of Public Works and Housing. Community participation, he said, “ensures ownership of the programme.”

Now in its third year, the One Million Initiative has reached hundreds of thousands in Mozambique with improved sanitation conditions and access to safe water.

“We realize this is worth it,” said Alberto Saguate, a father of six from neighbouring Nhaussau village. Through the CLTS programme, his community built outhouses for more than 170 households in recent months. “Our children are healthier, and we have not had cholera in this village since we built the toilets,” he said.

Mozambique: Health workers killed in tragic case of ignorance

The Mozambican Red Cross has halted its health work in the northern province of Nampula following the killing of two volunteers by the local community, who were convinced they were deliberately spreading cholera.

“Nampula has one of the highest [case loads] and deaths due to cholera, and our treatment and prevention strategy involved purifying contaminated wells and boreholes,” Fernanda Teixeira, the national society’s secretary-general, told IRIN.

“When one of the cholera victims in Quinga village died soon after chlorine had been used to decontaminate a well, the bereaved people in the local community got angry. They rushed to the conclusion that the Red Cross was spreading cholera in the wells, when they were in fact putting in chlorine,” Teixeira explained.

Read more: IRIN, 16 Mar 2009