Turning fecal sludge into a resource: New approaches required to achieve the rural sanitation SDGs

Safely managed sanitation is a focus of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is central to stunting reduction and early childhood survival, both identified by the World Bank’s Human Capital Index as critical for humans to develop their full potential. It is widely known that 4.5 billion people lacked access to safely managed sanitation in 2015, according to the Joint Monitoring Programme. Less well understood is that hundreds of millions more people in densely populated rural areas are exposed to significant health risk due to unsafely managed sanitation.

In contrast to urban areas, fecal sludge management (FSM) is not yet recognized as a priority for the rural sanitation sector – it is assumed to be less of an issue because rural areas are more sparsely populated. However, some densely populated areas fall under rural administrations, notably in deltas and on the periphery of rapidly growing rural areas. In these areas there is also a need to safely manage fecal waste. Many sanitation systems that, for lack of scrutiny, are assumed to be improved and safe, but due to lack of scrutiny they fail to safely manage fecal sludge.

A new World Bank report-supported by the Global Water Security and Sanitation Program (GWSP) – and six case studies identified specific causes of health risks in locations in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Egypt, India, and Vietnam. They include compromised construction of on-site sanitation solutions, incorrect technology choices, poorly developed FSM markets, predominantly manual emptying practices and indiscriminate dumping of sludge in the immediate environment. They found that environmental regulations and building codes do not address FSM effectively, and enforcement is often weak. Rural administrations typically lack the mandate and institutional capacity to provide and manage FSM services.

Read the full blog by Joep Verhagen and Pippa Scott

Citation

“Verhagen, Joep; Scott, Pippa. 2019. Safely Managed Sanitation in High-Density Rural Areas : Turning Fecal Sludge into a Resource through Innovative Waste Management. World Bank, Washington, DC. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/32385 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”

 

Unilever to launch world’s first Toilet Academy in Vietnam

Unilever to launch world’s first Toilet Academy in Vietnam | Source: The Guardian, Dec 2014 |

First Domestos Toilet Academy opened in Vietnam

Unilever is also pioneering an innovative approach to the provision of sanitation, through its continued partnership with the World Toilet Organization, to launch the world’s first Domestos Toilet Academy in Vietnam. This academy will provide the business skills and training necessary for local entrepreneurs to source and supply latrines to their local communities – providing jobs and a boost to the economy, and at the same time promoting the importance of safe and hygienic sanitation. The Toilet Academy programme aims to be a sustainable and long-term solution to sanitation that benefits local society and helps stimulate local economy.

For 2.5 billion people across the developing world, having no access to even the most basic sanitation is a reality faced every day Photograph: Ahmed Jallanzo/EPA

Dr Nguyen Thi Kim Tien, Minister of Health Vietnam said: “Currently, many countries, including Vietnam, are still facing lots of difficulties and challenges. Challenges of globalization as well as environmental pollution, population growth and urbanization have impacted the sanitation crisis. In Vietnam, the Government has put strong emphasis on stimulating and promoting the “Patriotic Hygiene Movement” to mobilize all management agencies, organizations at all levels and entire nation to join hands in improving hygiene and sanitation as this is essential in the current context.”

“The active participation of businesses like Unilever, helping improve health and hygiene for communities is greatly appreciated and widely acknowledged. The launch of the Toilet Academy clearly demonstrates Unilever’s enormous effort and will positively contribute to improve sanitary conditions for Vietnamese people.”

Read the complete article.

International Women’s Day in Asia: celebrating women in sanitation

In a new video, Mayadevi and Kaman (Nepal),  Toan and Thinh (VietNam) and  Tshering, Drukda, Tashi and Deschen (Bhutan) share stories about women’s participation, leadership and their changing roles in promoting sanitation and hygiene in  Nepal, Bhutan and Viet Nam.

The video is from SNV’s Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All Programme (SSH4A), which has been implemented by local governments and partners in 17 districts across Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Viet Nam and Cambodia since 2008. It aims to provide one million people with access to improved hygiene and sanitation facilities by the end of 2015. As the approach aims at addressing access to sanitation for all, addressing gender issues and inequalities is key.

SSH4A is a partnership between SNV, the Governments of the Netherlands, Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Viet Nam and Cambodia in Asia and the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre with support from AusAID and DFID.

Learn more about SSH4A at www.snvworld.org/node/3779 and www.irc.nl/ssh4a

In Bangladesh, IRC is supporting BRAC  to measure behavioural change in the   BRAC  WASH II programme. Christine Sijbesma of IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and Mahjabeen Ahmed of the BRAC share their thoughts and experiences with monitoring sanitation and hygiene behaviour of women in the programme in a recent blog post [1].

The QIS monitoring system that is being used gives special attention to gender and sanitation. First because many of the indicators differentiate between women and men. Secondly because data collection for each sample is duplicated by a male and a female monitoring team.  Interestingly, preliminary results show that virtually all the male and female monitoring teams members gave the same scores for the gender indicators.

[1] Bangladeshi women catch up on sanitation, IRC, 08 March 2013

Viet Nam: world’s first Unilever-sponsored Toilet Academy opens in 2012

Unilever is partnering with the World Toilet Organization (WTO) to set up Domestos Toilet Academies around the world, starting with a pilot Academy in Viet Nam opening in 2012.

The Domestos Toilet Academy will run month-long training courses for local people interested in setting up their own businesses to source, sell and maintain toilets, and educate local communities on the importance of sanitation.

In Viet Nam, only half the population has ‘some sort’ of sanitation facility, and 82% do not have access to facilities that meet the hygiene standards of the country’s Ministry of Health. “Only 12% of schools actually have hygienic toilet access, with rural areas suffering the most”, said WTO founder Jack Sim.

Unilever will also be partnering with UNICEF to help promote health through improved hygiene and access to toilets, stated Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Unilever.

Domestos is the Unilever brand name for its bleach products (also sold as Domex, Glorix, Klinex).

Source: Unilever, 14 Nov 2011

Viet Nam: Integrating sanitation marketing into a national program

Nguyen, H.H. (2011). Integrating sanitation marketing into a national program : a case study in Vietnam. Brisbane, QLD, Australia, International Water Centre.
Read the full report

Supply-driven approaches to rural sanitation in Viet Nam, with associated toilet subsidies, have had little success over the last decade. Since 2003, International Development Enterprises (IDE) Vietnam has achieved better results in several pilots with an alternative approach involving rural sanitation marketing. As a result, the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) has supported IDE in collaboration with the Health Environment Agency of the Ministry of Health (MOH) (HEMA) to implement a rural sanitation marketing pilot project within the National Target Program II (NTP II) program in Quang Tri province since 2010. This report  provides an analysis of the potential as well as the constraints for integrating sanitation marketing into NTP II.

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

Viet Nam: comedian teaches children about better hygiene

In one of his first appearances in his new role as Viet Nam’s Goodwill Ambassador for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), the 35-year-old actor and comedian Xuan Bac features in a series of 30-second television spots showing children how to boil clean drinking water, help senior citizens clean the village to prevent water-borne diseases, and clean school toilets. Broadcast on major national station VTV, the spots target children between 7 and 15 years of age across the country, particularly in rural areas where use of unsafe water and poor sanitation and hygienic habits are still widespread.

Actor Xuan Bac teaches hand-washing with soap in one of the TV spots. Photo: © Minh Studio

Xuan Bac was appointed as a WASH Ambassador by the Government under a partnership between the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), UNICEF Viet Nam and Singaporean NGO Lien Aid. They are joined by four more organizations – Path, Plan International, World Vision, and Helevtas – in a collaborative WASH communication campaign for 2011.

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

Viet Nam: hygiene promotion should build on community action

The path down to a stream where children defecate. Viet Nam, Lao Ca province. Photo: Danida

More affordable sanitation technologies and participatory community interventions will make future hygiene promotion more effective, say two PhD-fellows Xuan Le Thi Thanh and Thilde Rheinländer. They have spent 16 months in ethnic minority communities in the Northern Province Lao Cai to do research on hygiene and sanitation promotion in the Danida-funded research project SANIVAT (Water Supply Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion in Vietnam). SANIVAT supports research and capacity building on the impacts of water, sanitation and hygiene interventions and investigates how people perceive hygiene, health risks and hygiene promotion.

Viet Nam: designing evidence-based communications programmes for handwashing with soap

Since 2006, the Viet Nam Ministry of Health and the Viet Nam Women’s Union, with support from the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), have been carrying out an evidence-based, comprehensive behaviour change communications programme to promote handwashing with soap (HWWS) among women aged 15-49 and schoolchildren aged 6-10 throughout Viet Nam. The ultimate objective is to reduce the incidence of diarrhoeal diseases in children under the age of five.

The programme has reached more than 1.8 million people in the first phase, with a target of 30 million in phase II. Viet Nam is one of four countries (along with Tanzania, Senegal and Peru) involved in a large global Scaling Up HWWS Behaviour Change project by WSP. This tests whether innovative behaviour change approaches can generate widespread and sustained changes in handwashing with soap habits in target populations. To date, the programme has developed two communications campaigns, one aimed at caretakers of children under the age of five and the other targeting rural and semi-urban schoolchildren in Viet Nam.

Read more: Source Bulletin, May 2010