Uganda, Kampala: marketing human excreta – a study of possible ways to dispose of urine and faeces

Marketing Human Excreta: A Study of Possible Ways to Dispose of Urine and Faeces from Slum Settlements in Kampala, Uganda, 2011. E Schroeder, Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

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Some key findings include: High sociocultural barriers associated with handling and using human excreta as fertilizer exist; sensitization does change people’s perceptions and behaviors considerably; and economical tools like the incentives applied in this study are helping to change people’s perceptions and behaviors.

Senegal: behavioral determinants of handwashing with soap – emergent learning

A new Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) Learning Note found that beliefs and ease of access to soap and water were correlated with handwashing with soap behaviors for given proxy measures among mothers and caretakers in Peru and Senegal.

“Behavioral Determinants of Handwashing with Soap Among Mothers and Caretakers: Emergent Learning from Senegal and Peru,” is based on survey data from nearly 3,500 households in Peru and 1,500 households in Senegal. This data was analyzed using FOAM, a conceptual framework developed by WSP to help identify factors that might facilitate or impeded handwashing with soap practices at critical times.

The analysis revealed that the impact of different determinants varies depending on the chosen proxy measure, such as the presence of a handwashing station or its distance from kitchen or latrine facilities. Given this variability, the Learning Note found that program managers must clearly define the exact behavior they seek to improve before choosing which determinant to focus on in their formative research.

Liberia: dirty little secret – the loo that saves lives

Villagers in Nyonken, Liberia, collect water from the river for cooking, washing and drinking, even though they know human waste from villages upstream may have contaminated it. Photo: Aubrey Wade / Guardian

Diarrhoea kills more children than HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined – and its main cause is food and water contaminated with human waste. Liberia’s president is trying to change all that, writes Rose George in The Guardian.

The author of the sanitation best seller “The Big Necessity” gets to interview to Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, ” the only serving head of state to have written in a major newspaper about the need for toilets”.

Sirleaf took a while to understand the place of good sanitation. Like countless Liberians, she grew up on the family farm, where the only toilet was the bush. “It came naturally,” she says, when I double-check that the president has just admitted to open defecation – or, as Liberians say, doing poo-poo in the bush. “That was what it was.”

Like the six out of seven Liberians who still do the same thing, or the 2.6 billion worldwide who have no toilet, Sirleaf didn’t see what was wrong with it. All that forest: what harm can a little poo-poo do? Now she knows better. She knows that diarrhoea – caused largely by people ingesting water or food contaminated by human waste – kills more children worldwide than HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined.

[...]

Only when she looked into why so many Liberian women were dying in childbirth, and why children were dying of something as banal as the squits, did she realise “there is a relationship with water and sanitation. I needed to understand why that was so, and partly it’s because people don’t have access to clean water. That was an eye-opener for us.”

Rose George asks Sirleaf why sanitation, compared to water supply, is receiving so little attention from both donors and communities. The Liberian president answers:

“People say they want health clinics,” she says, “but they don’t ask for sanitation. They say their children get malaria or dysentery, but they don’t ask for sanitation. We have to bring to their consciousness that sanitation is linked to health.”

Read the full Guardian article published on 3 February 2012.

Liberia: President Sirleaf finally signs WASH Compact

After a delay of more than half a year, the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, finally signed the Liberia WASH Compact in January 2012. The signing follows almost two months of lobbying by the WASH Working Group, an alliance of civil society organisations (CSOs). The group organised a series of WASH Crisis Talks around the country to promote the Compact.

The Liberia WASH Compact was developed at the Multi Donor Conference on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) held in Paynesville, outside Monrovia in May 2011. It 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. The Compact identifies four priority areas for sector stakeholders:  institutional capacity; service provision priorities and equity; data and monitoring and evaluation gaps; and financing mechanisms.

President Johnson-Sirleaf promised to share the learning and successes of the Compact with the nations in the Mano River Union and ECOWAS.

Read the Liberia WASH Compact

Related news: Liberian President and WASH Ambassador Ellen Johnson Sirleaf awarded Nobel Peace Prize, E-Source, 05 Dec 2011

Related web sites:

• Liberia WASH Portal
• Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) Partnership – Country Info

Source: Augustine N. Myers, Shout-Africa, 24 Jan 2012

Kenya: translating research into national-scale change: a WASH in schools case study

Translating Research into National-Scale Change: A Case Study from Kenya of WASH in Schools, 2011. SWASH Project.

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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.

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.

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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

Kenya: assessing the impact of a school-based water treatment, hygiene and sanitation programme on pupil absence

Tropical Medicine & International Health, December 2011, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-3156.2011.02927.x

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.

Access full article here

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.