Rainwater harvesting at primary schools

Q: You have good information but could you please avail us with information about rain water harvesting in rural primary schools or perhaps could you please contact me about safe rain water harvsting in primary schools? (anonymous user)

Answer: of all the documents available I would like to provide you with some practical documents to start with:

Factsheet on domestic rainwater harvesting (2003) written by our colleague Jo Smet. It’s a 4-pager with nice illustrations and provides a good introduction to the topic. You can find the document in IRC’s digital library: http://www.irc.nl/docsearch/title/125290

Smart Water Harvesting Solutions (2008). This booklet describes 17 water harvesting techniques; creative solutions in situations where ‘there seems to be no water’. Examples from all over the world are included. Each case provides a short description of the technique, applying conditions, advantages, considerations, costs and references.

Roofwater harvesting: a handbook for practitioners (2007), available in IRC’s digital library at http://www.irc.nl/docsearch/title/155697
This handbook has been written to assist NGO and government staff responsible for implementing domestic roofwater harvesting systems or programmes. It is also meant to serve as a source of material for rainwater harvesting associations preparing national design guidelines in local languages. Finally, it could be used by individual householders or masons literate in English to design single roofwater harvesting systems.

There is a lot more on rainwater harvesting, see for example our Q&A on rainwater harvesting. Much of this information is also of use for schools.

Please keep in mind however that for larger roofs, as is often the case for schools, problems may occur in a non-technical aspect: the management of the collected rainwater. It is sometimes difficult to achieve a fair distribution, and collecting sufficient funds for operation and maintenance may also be an issue.

Open source journals for WASH articles

Q: I would like to publish my article in such a way that it can be shared by as many people as possible. Somebody pointed me to open source journals, however I am also keen to publish my article in a peer reviewed journal without losing the right to also share it myself. Could you advise me? (Senior programme officer IRC, The Netherlands)

Answer: There are two roads to follow, while still being able to publish it on your own web site: the “green road” and the “golden road”.

The Golden Road: make use of open access journals, such as:

• American Journal of Agricultural and Biological Science;
• BMC Public Health;
• Bulletin of the World Health Organization;
• Drinking Water Engineering and Science (DWES)
• Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source;
• Indian Journal of Community Medicine;
• Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine;
• International Journal of Health Geographics;
• International Journal for Equity in Health;
• Journal of Applied Sciences;
• Water Alternatives;
• Water SA

The Green Road: options in peer-reviewed journals to keep your rights to publish

• Open Access self-archiving – deposit your digital document in a publicly accessible website. The author holds the copyright for the pre-refereeing preprint, so that the document can be self-archived without seeking anyone else’s permission.
• Green publishers – allow archiving pre-prints & post-prints (e.g. Elsevier)
• Blue publishers – allow archiving of post-prints but not pre-prints
• Yellow publishers – allow archiving of pre-prints but not post-prints
• White publishers – no archiving allowed (e.g. IWA)

[Source: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/ ]

Note for the reader: If you have used one or more of the options mentioned, please leave your comment. We would love to hear about your experiences!

Water quality test kit

Q: could you suggest me the methods to remove e-coli from community based urban water supply systems (closed channel flow)? The method which I am looking for is cost effective and having high efficency of e-coli removal. (student, Engineering college, Nepal)

Answer: We do have some information on commonly used field test kits, which might also be of use for urban water supply systems:

[1] The DelAgua kit, developed by Oxfam and the Robens Centre for Public and Environmental Health, University of Surrey, is designed to carry out five basic tests to measure the quality of drinking-water: microbiological quality, turbidity, free chlorine, total chlorine and pH.  The kit is designed for use in the field, but may also be used in a laboratory or other permanent location.

More info here: http://www.rcpeh.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=107&Itemid=559

A GWA case study of the use of the DelAgua kit by CARE in Yemen was recently published in Source Bulletin: http://www.irc.nl/page/40485

[2] Wagtech International Portable Water Testing – http://www.wagtech.co.uk/ShowCat.php?catid=3 . There have kits for monitoring micro-biological and physico-chemical water quality in the field.

On their web site they claim that they have supplied kits to UNICEF and WHO.

[3] India Water Portal has a list of field kits for water quality testing available in India. Included are the water quality parameters each kit can test for, the price (if available) and the supplier’s address. There is also a link to a 2005 UNICEF evaluation of several field testing kits. http://www.indiawaterportal.org/data/kits/index.html

[4] UNICEF has used simple water testing field kit for bacteriological quality only in post-tsunami programme in Sri Lanka

See Source South Asia, http://www.irc.nl/page/38743

We would advise you to check with local WES staff from ENPHO, WHO or UNICEF for more specific information about the use of water quality testing kits in Nepal:

ENPHO, 110/25 Adarsa Marga-1, Thapagaon, New Baneshwor; Email: enpho@mail.com.np; http://www.enpho.org/

WHO – Nepal,The WHO Representative; UN Building;PO Box 108; Kathmandu; guptasmithv@searo.who.int; http://www.searo.who.int/

UNICEF – Nepal; UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia (ROSA); P.O. Box 5815; Lekhnath Marg; Kathmandu, Nepal; http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/nepal.html; rosa@unicef.org; Tel: 977-1-4417.082; Fax: 977-1-4419.479; 4418.466

You may also be interested in the WEDC publication: Water Quality Surveillance – a practical guide, by Guy Howard

HIV/AIDS and menstruation: what are the minimum steps that must be taken in order to ensure that the bloodied rags are safe for reuse

Q: We have been told some conflicting information regarding safety precautions. On the one hand, some folks/guidelines recommend that a woman should wash the rags with soap and water, dry, and reuse them. Others, however, say that due to the highly infectious blood – particularly with women in stage 3 or 4 of the illness -the rags should be soaked in a bleach solution, boil them and wash them with soap and water.

We need to know what are the minimum steps that must be taken in order to ensure that the bloodied rags are safe for reuse, while placing as little strain and effort on women living with HIV/AIDS. (Beviour change specialist, USAID/HIP- Hygiene Improvement Project)

Answer: We don’t know the answer.
We do know that the HIV virus itself would not survive more than a few seconds of washing with water with or without soap, so even just well rinsed menstrual cloths wouldn’t be HIV-infectious to anyone else. However, for re-infecting the user with other illnesses, we are not sure.

You may want to contact the HIV/AIDS programme of the Royal Tropical Institute.

Comments and additions on this important topic are very much welcome!

Water quality field test kits for Indonesia

Q. I am in Jakarta to help design and plan the impact study at the end of the WSLIC2 WASH project.

The study will include testing quality of water in improved and unimproved sources and in some home storage vessels.

Tests should cover bacteriological quality, including E coli, and the most common chemical parameters (iron, fluoride, nitrate, ?) (not sure if other parameters, such as arsenic are important in Indonesia; will find out)

During the baseline, tests were done in laboratories.

Provinces concerned are West & East Java, S and W Sumatra, West Nusa Tenggara, S & W Sulawesi and Bangka Belitung (island off East coast of Sumatra).

I would like to propose field test kits if this is as effective and more efficient than lab tests of field samples, and the kits can be used without (much) training.

In my slow sand filtration days the usual kits were Millipore kits. However, there may be better alternatives today. The Shinyanga impact evaluation team used kits of Kyoritsu.

(IRC staff member)

Answer. Here is some info on commonly used field test kits.

[1] The DelAgua kit, developed by Oxfam and the Robens Centre for Public and Environmental Health, University of Surrey, is designed to carry out five basic tests to measure the quality of drinking-water: microbiological quality, turbidity, free chlorine, total chlorine and pH. The kit is designed for use in the field, but may also be used in a laboratory or other permanent location.

A GWA case study of the use of the DelAgua kit by CARE in Yemen was recently published in Source Bulletin

[2] Wagtech International Portable Water Testing. The have kits for monitoring micro-biological and physico-chemical water quality in the field. On their web site they claim that they have supplied kits to UNICEF and WHO.

[3] India Water Portal has published a list of field kits for water quality testing available in India. Included are the water quality parameters each kit can test for, the price (if available) and the supplier’s address. There is also a link to a 2005 UNICEF evaluation of several field testing kits.

[4] UNICEF has used simple water testing field kit for bacteriological quality only in post-tsunami programme in Sri Lanka. See a recent article in Source South Asia.

It is probably wise to check with local WES staff from WHO and UNICEF for more specific info about the use of field kits in Indonesia.
A.

Low-cost tools for water mapping and integrated planning

Q: We have helped Village Development Committees (VDCs) in parts of Nepal to map their water resources for holistic management and use. However, we have found it difficult to merge the resulting data with the existing government data and use them for higher level planning have not been resolved.
Therefore we are very interested in low-cost tools or methods that can help achieve such integration of data and enable their use for integrated planning and management of watersheds by communities and districts. Could you advise us on this?
(Project officer, NGO Nepal)

Answer (by Charles Batchelor, IRC): Bayesian Networks could be an option, however, the thing about BNs is that you have to be quite experienced in the dos and don’ts of data analysis and also modelling to use them effectively.  This rather limits their practical every day use.  
My suggestion for low cost integration of societal and technical information is to use some of the approaches that were developed as part of the EMPOWERS Project (e.g. analysis based on the RIDA Framework).  These methods and tools can be downloaded from http://www.project.empowers.info/page/3344 

For reconciling official statistics with realities on the ground, water resource auditing or assessments is probably the best option.  A WRA that was carried out for DFID in AP a few years ago is a good example (this can be downloaded from http://www.nri.org/projects/WSS-IWRM/reports.htm.  Low-cost or light water resources assessments are also an option (see the EMPOWERS guidelines).

I hope this helps.

 

Developments in on-site sanitation

Q. Where can I find information on recent developments in on-site sanitation?

A. The topics related to on-site sanitation that have received most attention over the past few years are ecological sanitation (ecosan), Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and school sanitation.

Below are a number of key web sites and recent publications on the above topics and on-site sanitation in general.

Web sites

• IRC – Thematic page on Sanitation
• Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) (members are all the key organisations dealing with sanitation in development)
• WEDC – International Year of Sanitation
• WSSCC – Hurry up campaign
• WHO – International Year of Sanitation 2008
• EcoSanRes: Ecological Sanitation Research
• International Year of Sanitation 2008 – Sanitary Facilities
• Duncan Mara’s home page – International Year of Sanitation 2008
• Livelihoods Connect: Community Led Total Sanitation
• WSP – Sanitation & Hygiene
• WASH in Schools

Publications

By IRC

• IRC/WaterAid (2008). Beyond construction. See especially the summary paper.
• NWP et al. (2006). Smart sanitation solutions
• Bruijne, G. de et al. (2007). Sanitation for All ?
• Borba, M.L. et al (2007). Enhancing livelihoods through sanitation
• IRC and UNICEF (2007). Towards effective programming for WASH in schools : a manual on scaling up programmes for water, sanitation and hygiene in schools.

By others

• Kar, K. and Chamber, R. (2008). Handbook on community-led total sanitation
• Deak, A. (2008). Taking community-led total sanitation to scale : movement, spread and adaptation
• Pedi, D. (ed.) (2008). Sharing experiences : sustainable sanitation in Southeast Asia and the Pacific
• Black, M. and Fawcett, B. (2008). The last taboo : opening the door on the global sanitation crisis. London, UK, Earthscan and UNICEF.
• Webster, L. (2007). The sanitation scandal : identifying and responding to the barriers to improved sanitation and hygiene in developing countries.
• Fewtrell, L.et al. (2007). Water, sanitation and hygiene : quantifying the health impact at national and local levels in countries with incomplete water supply and sanitation coverage
• Morgan, P. (2007). Toilets that make compost : low-cost, sanitary toilets that produce valuable compost for crops in an African context.
• Harvey, P.A. (2007). Excreta disposal in emergencies : a field manual

News

Sanitation Updates

Effect of access to water and sanitation on achieving MDGs

Q: I know that improved access to water and sanitation has a positive effect on more than half of the MDGs. Do you have a 1-2 page summary of these effects?
(sector professional, Dutch NGO)

Answer: The best two-pages are from WaterAid, as far as I know. They illustrate that access to safe water and sanitation will underpin success in achieving all the MDGs and must be part of an integrated approach to development. See: http://www.wateraid.org/international/what_we_do/policy_and_research/6241.asp

Examples of water and conflict

Q. The Pacific Institute (USA) is updating, again, our Water Conflict Chronology and we’re looking for new (2006-2008 ) examples you might have come across recently of violence related to water: access, quality, terrorism, etc. in the news.

Answer. Use this link to find articles published over the past year in Source Weekly on “conflict” or “conflicts”.

See also the documents published in the Negotiating peri-urban water conflicts (NEGOWAT) project (2003-2006).

How to get involved in the International Year of Sanitation?

Q: Ours is a research and development center for the youth under the aegis of the ministry of youth affairs and sports of the government of India. We want to participate in the international year of sanitation and also for the programmes and we want to promote the programme in our area. (Institute of National Instruments, India)

Answer:
If you are interested in getting involved in the International Year of Sanitation, please visit the official site of the IYS. There you will find some ideas to get you started. Go to the section Get Involved for more information.