12 Sunday May 2013
Posted in Starting Up
Tags
This is just for fun: a collection of water drop logos, with one little surprise. All of these are logos for real organizations or events.
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This is not intended to be an endorsement of any organization.
27 Saturday Apr 2013
Posted in Results, Impact, Sharing
Tags
#sustainability, #water, hybrid managment, IRC, maintenance, post construction support, post-implementation, service support, WSUP
I’m here to support your services (photo credit: Susan Davis 2012)
If something goes wrong with your toilet or your sink, who do you call? Unless you are pretty handy, you call a plumber, and you pay the plumber. Similarly, the concept of services support, also known post construction support (PCS) recognizes that a rural community water committee might not be able to deal with all possible situations that affect its water point/system or toilets no matter how well trained they are.
Community management has been built into many water programs since the 1990s, but in the 2000s concerns arose about the ability of rural communities to manage systems without support like follow-up training or expert advice. Combine this with the fact that up until recently, there was very little broad scale information on how much it cost to operate and maintain rural water systems around the world.
What types of post-construction support are typically provided? In a study of water systems in Bolivia, Peru, and Ghana the following activities were provided.
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Percent of villages that received …after completion of project construction |
Ghana |
Peru |
Bolivia |
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Visits from external organization(s) to assist with maintenance or repairs |
52% |
14% |
22% |
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Visits from external organization(s) to assist with accounting, tariffs, etc. |
33% |
6 |
13% |
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Technical training for the system operator |
34% |
49% |
41% |
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Free repairs |
21% |
NA |
NA |
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Written manuals or other materials |
37% |
25% |
30% |
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Help with finding or receiving spare parts |
45% |
7% |
11% |
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Grants from outside sources for repairs, new construction, system rehabilitation, capacity expansion, or other assistance |
16% |
3% |
8% |
Interestingly, this same study found: no association between a village receiving a technical PCS visit (to help with repairs or maintenance) and having a working water system. However, post-construction technical training of system operators or caretakers was positively associated with system performance in both Ghana and Bolivia (Whittington et al 2008).
Stef Smits of IRC shared results of the Triple-S initiative in a blog a few months ago, saying “community-based management is dead,” maybe. Perhaps it could work for piped water systems, but not for single water points, but we need to question the underlying assumptions and acknowledge the evidence on actual demand for water. In another blog, Smits points out that it doesn’t make much sense to develop monitoring systems if the responsibility for post-construction support is not clearly defined, because there is little incentive for service providers to provide data and no capacity to use the data.
A new brief from Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) suggests we stop distinguishing between community management and private sector management and think of hybrid models to get the best of both worlds (WSUP 2013). Their recommendations to program managers include:
23 Saturday Mar 2013
Posted in Results, Impact, Sharing
Last week I went to the Sustainable WASH Forum and Donor Dialogues in DC. A theme of the conversations was roles and responsibilities, especially the roles of governments. One interesting debate was about who should be responsible for monitoring. Some said that governments should be solely responsible. There are some governments who are leading the way on this, but I and others believe that this doesn’t mean that development organizations shouldn’t also be accountable for their own work. If an organization visits water and toilet systems for years after they are built, they can learn from their successes and failures and make their future work better.
Since many organizations only do monitoring & evaluation (M&E) during development programs (see my thoughts after the Learn MandE conference), I think we need to use a new term like “services monitoring” to refer to the need for a way of confirming that water and sanitation services are still available to people.
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780 million+++ |
783 million people without access to improved source of water[i]3 billion without access to safe water[ii]4 billion without access to safe, permanent, in home water[iii] |
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2.5 billion+++ |
2.5 billion people without adequate sanitation[i]4.1 billion lack access to improved sanitation[iv] |
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35-50% |
water and sanitation systems that fail within a few years of construction[v] |
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Less than 5% |
water systems that are visited at least once after they are built |
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Less than 1% |
water systems and toilets that are monitored regularly for the long-term after they are built |
Long-term service monitoring is critical for the ongoing improvement of implementing organization practice and understanding, as well as donor policies. Beyond helping individual organizations learn from their experience, services monitoring could reveal geographical or sectoral trends. What if each year, USAID, other government aid agencies, development banks, and major foundations pooled a portion of their funds for water & sanitation projects ? These funds could be used to ensure service monitoring for all (or a sample of) previous water and sanitation systems funded by those donors in a country or region.
With this information, they could identify region-wide problems and solutions. For example, declining amounts of water available from spring fed systems in a geographic region could point to a need for investing in water source protection and installation of household water meters to reduce leaks and wastage.
To remove some of the barriers to ongoing service monitoring, we recommend a way forward below.
As more service monitoring data become available and accessible, we’ll get past the statistics to specifics, leading to learning, and more effective performance. Thus, people in developing countries will have a better chance at reaping the life-changing benefits of safe water for life.
16 Saturday Mar 2013
Posted in Results, Impact, Sharing
Tags
In an earlier blog I wrote about the confusion on how we should estimate how many people lack access to water. A recent article by the UNC Water Institute (full disclosure: I could only read the abstract without paying for the article) suggests some rather shitty numbers:
We estimate that in 2010, 40% of the global population (2.8 billion people) used improved sanitation, as opposed to the estimate of 62% (4.3 billion people) from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), and that 4.1 billion people lacked access to an improved sanitation facility.
The abstract also shares this sunny yet horrifying cartoon that shows the direct line from untreated sewerage (poop) to people’s drinking water:
The very bad news
So, this is yet another reason to rethink how we frame the global development goals. You, yes you, can vote on the changes that would make the most difference to you in the world. If you think of this graphic and remember that in a way we are all drinking the same water, you might want to include “access to water & sanitation” in your priorities.
13 Wednesday Feb 2013
Posted in Results, Impact, Sharing
23 Wednesday Jan 2013
Posted in Results, Impact, Sharing
Tags
In a recent interview I was asked to describe the global water and sanitation crisis. I used to be able to quote the statistics confidently: “X billion don’t have water; X billion don’t have toilets.” The numbers, happily, have decreased over time. Or have they?
In March 2012, the World Health Organization trumpeted that the Millennium Development Goal for water had been met, early (the goals aimed for 2015)! This means that between 1990 and 2010, more than 2 billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources, such as piped supplies and protected wells.
So the world’s target is now the 783 million people still without access to safe drinking water.
Progress in Drinking Water & Sanitation?
Or is it? WHO & UNICEF, the authors of the Progress on Drinking Water & Sanitation 2012 report, cautioned that the measurement of water quality is not possible globally, and “Significant work must be done to ensure that improved sources of water are and remain safe.”
“Remain safe.” This brings me to the concern that we might be taking 2 billion steps forward, and 1 billion steps back. Knowing what we know about water system failures, how can we be sure that all the people counted as having improved (if not safe) water access will still have it next year?
Assuming the water is still flowing, is it actually of good quality? A study by the University of North Carolina estimates that 3 billion people don’t have access to safe water, using a more stringent definition that includes both actual water quality and sanitary risks. That figure is 2.3 billion more than the WHO & UNICEF official estimate.
And if you want to get really picky, consider the article by Gerard Payen, AquaFed president & member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation. He states, “Depending on the criteria used to define satisfactory access to safe drinking water, the current need can be assessed to be either less than one billion people. . . or almost 4 billion (more than half the world’s population).” The bigger number is an estimate of users without “permanent and satisfactory safe drinking water supply in the home.” But hardly anyone is measuring the availability of water and customer satisfaction.
Payen defines access like most Americans would define it: “water of good quality, in sufficient quantity, and without need for additional treatment, on an almost constant basis, in their homes for their daily life.” I think that’s a reasonable target. If you agree, you have a chance to chime in on how the next set of global goals are defined; join the dialog here.
11 Friday Jan 2013
Posted in Results, Impact, Sharing
Tags
#cost, #sustainability, #water, failure, maintenance, ownership
You get a free car!
I often compare the idea of giving a water system to a poor community to giving a very poor person a car. What’s wrong with a free car? If you were poor and needed a reliable way to get to work, wouldn’t a free car be great? That’s what Oprah thought in 2004, when she gave away 300 new cars. You might remember the episode – “Everyone gets a car!” – lots of excited screaming from the recipients.
But the car wasn’t really free. Each person had to pay about $4000 in Federal and State income taxes. That’s a lot of cash to come up with right away, especially if you don’t have much money to begin with. Here are a few other problems with the free car:
Now imagine this free car is given to a poor person in rural area in a developing country. The free car gets even worse. In addition to the problems above:
How is a free car like a free water system? Well, similar challenges apply. The ability of the person or community to take care of the system, skills or money, may be low. The incentive for using or taking care of the water system might not be what the car-giver expected. Individuals might expect the organization who built the system – whether charitable or governmental – to be responsible for maintenance. In many places, people expect water to be free. (But as one of my colleagues asks, “God gave us the water but who will pay for the pumps and pipes?”)
The five-year long WASHCost project found that recurrent costs range from $3 to $6 (US) per person per year for boreholes and handpumps, and from $3 to $15 (US) per person per year for piped water systems. While that might not sound very expensive to Americans, remember that many of the people who are getting these “free water systems” make $1 to $2 per day. The WASHCost researchers also found that very few people or institutions paid for those recurrent costs (Working paper 8: Executive Summary – The recurrent expenditure gap: Failing to meet and sustain basic water services).
Water systems and cars, lacking preventive maintenance, work poorly or stop working altogether (see water system failure rates here).
07 Monday Jan 2013
Posted in Improvements
This might sound obvious, but when you build a water system for a poor community, the point of it is to provide safe water to those families, reliably, for a long time – if not forever. That’s what charitable organizations are telling their donors, at least: “$25 will save a life!” Well, that water system is not saving lives if it breaks, is it?
So how does the charitable organization, or the donor, know if the water system is still working? The customers in the community know right away when it breaks, of course, but they often don’t know who to call. Governments in developing countries focus more on providing new water systems to communities than looking back to see whether old systems are still working. The organization that built it could send staff to visit the communities, but many say they don’t have enough funds or staff time to check all of the water systems regularly, or ever.
That’s why many people are looking to cell phones to help fill in the information gaps. If we armed community members with cell phones to report on their water system functionality, maybe we could get more real-time information. But what if we could get the handpump to directly report when it’s not working to the government, the handpump mechanic, the charitable organization, and/or the donor? Below I’ve described some new efforts that are interesting. However, as the lead Oxford researcher caveats: “There are a lot of gadgets and gizmos and devices out there, but those alone don’t really resolve the enduring problem of rural water supply sustainability,” says Rob Hope. “It’s really the institutional reforms that emerge from using the information in a more effective manner. That’s where our research is really focused.”
Remote monitoring alone won’t create sustainability, but if it these pilots show that it works over time, and the costs come down, these devices/tools can be built into program costs. Governments can require them, and use the data for decision-making. Donors can expect them, and use the data to decide where to give. Customers will finally have a connection to the people trying to help them. Then there will be no more excuses for not knowing whether water is flowing.
28 Friday Dec 2012
Posted in Improvements
When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.
― Benjamin Franklin
Today I am actively appreciating that I live in a country where I can drink water out of the tap, pretty much anywhere. I’ve can get up in the middle of the night and walk a few steps for a glass of water, and I won’t wake up with diarrhea. I can order a glass of tap water at a restaurant or get a drink with ice in it without worrying about getting cholera. I can get a drink from a water fountain in the park or a public building and know I won’t get a debilitating parasite. I don’t need to buy bottled water of questionable quality, or wait in line at a public tap. Sure, there are challenges with aging infrastructure in Atlanta and other cities, but there are institutions, regulations, and laws in place to make sure we have plentiful, convenient, safe water, 24 hours a day. That is a luxury.
19 Wednesday Dec 2012
Posted in Improvements
Tags
#water, government, Haiti, point of use, quality, regulations
Seeing the glass as half empty is more positive than seeing it as half full. Through such a lens the only choice is to pour more. That is righteous pessimism. ― Criss Jami
I firmly believe that governments are responsible for providing services to their citizens. Humanitarian and development organizations can play a role in helping governments use their scarce resources wisely and to do their jobs better. There are some great examples of governments taking charge of coordinating the external and internal non-governmental efforts to improve quality and effectiveness. One I’ll celebrate today is Haiti.
At the UNC Water & Health Conference in October, I heard Myriam Léandre Joseph speak. She is with Haiti’s National Direction of Potable Water and Sanitation (DINEPA), which was established in 2009 to regulate the water sector. Ms. Joseph said that 20% of the population gets its water from an unprotected (likely contaminated) source. After the earthquake in 2010, many organizations swooped in with water treatment products, which were of variable quality. With funding and support from the US Centers for Disease Control, UNICEF, and CAWST, Haiti now requires water treatment products to be tested and registered.
DINEPA is now doing project evaluations. Ms. Joseph gave one example where they evaluated biosand filters. Of 22 households visited, only 8 were using their filters; two of the water samples were contaminated, meaning the filter wasn’t working or was being used incorrectly.
DINEPA has also trained 36 rural department unit technicians to analyze and evaluate treatment products and projects submitted for registration. Once this is fully rolled out across the country, any citizen in Haiti can expect that the water treatment product they use will be high quality and keep them from getting cholera and other waterborne diseases.
This is a great example of outside experts helping experts in the developing country and the government taking control.
See more information about this effort in the conference abstract book. See a Washington Post article about other ways DINEPA is working on water here.
