Search results for:

• (Journal Article) Can and should sanitation and hygiene programmes be expected to achieve health impacts?

  01.01.2017
  Although the anticipated health benefits are not the only reason for undertaking sanitation and hygiene programmes, they do represent an important part of the justification. Studies and reviews over recent years have shown, however, that the health impacts of sanitation programmes can be quite small or even negligible. They have also provided no solid evidence that integrated (water, sanitation, hygiene) programming has any greater effect than addressing one or two of these components alone. Two questions arise: first, whether a certain level of sanitation usage and hygiene practice within a community is needed in order to achieve a measurable health impact (i.e. whether a minimum percentage of the population should be using safe sanitation); second, whether sanitation and hygiene interventions undertaken without accompanying water supply improvements are likely to have significant health benefits. In this opinion paper some plausible and practically relevant answers to these questions are extracted from the relevant literature. The conclusions are that a high level of sanitation usage (well over 65 per cent) and widespread handwashing practice are necessary to achieve significant health impact; and that in situations where water services are poor, sanitation and hygiene interventions, while valuable for other reasons, are unlikely to have significant health impacts. Sanitation and hygiene programmes may be justifiable even if they do not immediately achieve high levels of compliance and corresponding water supply improvements are not made; however, the justification should not be presented on the grounds of short-term health benefits.

• (Journal Article) Crossfire: Can effective programming approaches to lift people over the poverty line focus on market systems alone?

  01.03.2022
  

• (Journal Article) Improving management of manually emptied pit latrine waste in Nairobi’s urban informal settlements

  01.01.2021
  Sanergy has offered reliable, non-sewered sanitation services in Nairobi, Kenya through the implementation of container-based, urine-diverting dry toilets. However, there remains a large volume of untreated faecal waste in urban informal settlements due to poorly managed pit latrines. With limited space in the settlements to bury old pits and dig new ones, management of faecal sludge requires manual pit emptying and safe discharge. Sanergy piloted the Mtaa Fresh project in the settlement of Mukuru Kwa Njenga, establishing a waste transfer station where manual pit emptiers could safely and reliably dispose of pit latrine contents. The most important factors in the successful implementation of this station were, first, the relationship established between Sanergy and the pit emptiers and, second, Sanergy’s commitment to iterating as new insights emerged. The relationship with the emptiers impacted the location, design, and adoption of the site, and aided in the formalization of a pit emptiers’ community-based organization. The commitment to iterating enabled Sanergy to respond to learnings gained from the emptiers. Additional factors that ensured the success of Mtaa Fresh included the implementation of full-time staff, security when the site is closed, support from local authorities, and an expansion to improve management of faecal sludge and trash. Improvements trialled during the expansion aim to minimize operation and maintenance costs, but sustainability will still rely on government support and external funding.

• (Journal Article) Are ceramic water filters effective in preventing diarrhoea and acute malnutrition among under-five children in Sudan?

  01.07.2020
  Access to safe drinking-water at home is essential during the outpatient treatment of children with acute malnutrition due to their increased vulnerability to infections and disease. The study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of ceramic water filters with safe storage in preventing diarrhoea and acute malnutrition among under-five children in Kassala state, Sudan. It was designed as an open-label randomized controlled trial, comparing two study groups. Data was collected through face-to-face interviews and direct observations, then processed and analysed using Epi Info 7.2.0.1. Use of water filters is a potential predictor of number of diarrhoea episodes per child (P < 0.001). The intervention group had a lower diarrhoea occurrence (P < 0.001), better monthly average weight gain (P = 0.012) and average mid-upper arm circumference increase (P = 0.001), and lower prevalence of acute malnutrition at the end of the study (P = 0.001) compared with the control group. Ceramic water filters with safe storage can be effective in preventing diarrhoea and acute malnutrition, and beneficial to children admitted to Community Management of Acute Malnutrition programmes in Kassala state. More research is needed to understand the pathways to achieving these outcomes. Other WASH interventions may be needed to interrupt the primary vectors of diarrhoea disease transmission in this setting.

• (Journal Article) Green microfinance strategy for entrepreneurial transformation: validating a pattern towards sustainability

  01.12.2015
  This paper illustrates a shifted microfinance modality that adopted greening principles towards sustainability. The empirical context of the research was a green microfinance programme implemented by an NGO microfinance institution at two study sites in Bangladesh. The research conceived and tested a microfinance model underpinned by ‘ecological modernization’ and ‘innovation and entrepreneurship’ theories. Field studies were carried out between January 2012 and June 2013 in order to match the ‘theoretical realm’ with the ‘observational realm’. A case study and participatory methods were the primary means of studying the modality and operations of the green microfinance strategy. The study compared the ecological outcomes of green microfinance-assisted enterprises and traditional microcredit-assisted enterprises and measured their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Cool Farm Tool software was used to quantify GHGs. Comparison with a designed experiment shows that micro-enterprises employing green strategies emit less GHGs than the ones with traditional strategies. The research revealed that the microfinance-based greening interventions help to ensure ecological outcomes for micro-enterprises; thus, the combination of the embedded economic and social elements of the classic microfinance model with the new ecological elements supports sustainability.

• (Journal Article) Addressing women’s needs in water access for economic use: the case of Wukro town, Ethiopia

  01.07.2020
  In urban areas where water is not adequately supplied, women’s efforts to make a living out of water-intensive businesses face many challenges. The study examined how small-scale businesses run by women in Wukro town, Ethiopia are impacted by inadequate supply of water, and what coping strategies are employed. The lived experiences of women involved in small-scale water-intensive businesses, such as traditional beer brewing and coffee shops, were examined. In addition to these women, the perspectives and experiences of selected key informants as well as the officers at the local water utility have been assessed. Whether or not these women secure support from the social networks in their neighbourhood has also been considered. The study revealed that the unreliable supply of water in the town has impacted women involved in small business. It was indicated that some women manage to do well either by borrowing water from neighbours or purchasing from providers. In contrast, others who run businesses in rented houses with limited social networks expressed that they are struggling. Suggestions are made for the water utility to revise its working guidelines related to the provision of water services and to implement a gendered perspective in water management practices.

• (Journal Article) A call to action: organizational, professional, and personal change for gender transformative WASH programming

  01.07.2020
  The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets aimed at improving access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) are also an opportunity for the transformation of gender norms. To facilitate this transformation, this paper makes a call to action for global and national efforts for organizational, professional, and personal change. Several NGOs are leading a process towards a more reflective and transformative approach. This paper presents a number of examples – from headquarters, and others from country offices and research institutes – of the changes under way to support a stronger connection between the ‘outer faces’ of WASH professionals in the sector and the individual, personal inner spaces. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for personal and organizational change.

• (Journal Article) Realizing integrated wastewater/greywater management in Jordanian public schools

  01.10.2021
  This article highlights a case study in enabling Jordanian schools to become active agents of adaptation against water scarcity. It aims to demonstrate integrated water resources management at schools with adequate functional sustainability. This case study seeks to answer the question, are Jordanian public schools able to functionally sustain improved water and sanitation? The methodology consists of a twofold process: 1) adapting locally built, innovative, and functionally sustainable technologies; and 2) ensuring local development and local management. It finds that greywater/wastewater treatment, alongside improved reuse facilities and services, can be sustained and functional as long as it achieves effective school water demand, is powered with renewable energy, and is accompanied by a clear coordination, operation, and maintenance framework. Such intervention can reduce freshwater use and energy costs to approximately 30 per cent and 90 per cent respectively.

• (Journal Article) Fostering economic opportunities for youth in Africa: a comprehensive approach

  01.06.2015
  Youth unemployment and working poverty are large and growing development challenges. The barriers faced by young women and men in accessing sustainable livelihoods are many, so supporting their successful transition into employment and entrepreneurship requires a comprehensive and holistic approach. This article reflects on the evolving approach of The MasterCard Foundation-supported programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, within the broader context of wider research and evidence. It suggests that combining training in a range of market-relevant skills, with access to job and business opportunities and appropriate financial services, can foster economic opportunities for youth. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing the role of mixed livelihoods in contexts where formal jobs are lacking, and of supporting youth engagement in agriculture and agribusiness as viable livelihood opportunities. And it highlights that the challenge can only be adequately addressed via the meaningful engagement of a range of stakeholders, including the private sector, government and civil society, and, especially, youth themselves.

• (Journal Article) The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on microfinance institutions in Indonesia

  01.06.2021
  The paper aims to analyse the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on microfinance institutions (MFIs) and identify mitigation and adaptation measures to cope with the situation. An online survey and focus group discussions were employed to capture how far the COVID-19 pandemic affects MFIs’ business. The results show that MFIs’ performance is negatively affected due to the COVID-19 crisis as their major customers, micro and small enterprises (MSEs), have experienced a contraction. MFIs have implemented several mitigation and adaptation measures to cope with the situation and future shocks. These results provide an overview of how far the COVID-19 crisis affects MFIs which can help the government design policies that can support MFIs and MSEs to survive. However, some issues related to methodology, such as the inability to capture complex and profound information, survey monitoring, and response rate, influenced the analysis so that the research may lack generalizability. Thus, a more holistic methodology is needed to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic comprehensively.

• (Journal Article) Urban community-led total sanitation: a potential way forward for co-producing sanitation services

  01.10.2016
  Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) has been proved to be a successful strategy for tackling the challenge of open defecation in poor rural communities across Africa and Asia. This article explores whether a similar approach can be used in peri-urban and urban areas to help co-produce sanitation facilities and services with inputs from communities, duty bearers, and other sanitation stakeholders. It is argued that an urban CLTS approach does not mean a copy and paste of tools and methods which have proved successful in the rural environment but following a set of similar principles. Based on field experiences different steps are suggested that incorporate these principles and respond to the specific urban sanitation problem. This article helps to articulate and better define urban CLTS as well as giving practical guidance for those wanting to use this kind of approach.

• (Journal Article) Schoolgirls’ experiences of changing and disposal of menstrual hygiene items and inferences for WASH in schools

  01.10.2015
  Menstrual hygiene management (MHM) challenges during changing and disposal of menstrual items are important in low-income countries (LICs) where schools lack sufficient water and sanitation. Changing in poorly maintained latrines may expose girls to excrement and infection. We examine the frequency of dropping menstrual items and disposal of waste by schoolgirls in a menstrual solutions feasibility study in western Kenya. Drops when changing were reported in 17 per cent (20 per cent <16 years; 16.5 per cent 16 years plus; p=0.04) of girls’ reports overall. Differences by socio-economic status were not evident. Fifty-four per cent of girls dropped at least once. A quarter of girls using pads and cups reported drops in the first few months, reducing to 10 per cent over time, compared with ~30 per cent among traditional item users. One in four accidental drops occurred at school during the study. When dropped at school, most girls swapped the dropped item for a new one, but 24 per cent brushed/washed the item and reused it. While no clinical events occurred during this study, data suggest dropping within latrines could place girls at potential risk of exposure to infection. Disposal of items, or emptying cups, was mostly into the latrine. We conclude that accidental dropping of menstrual items while changing is common, including at school. Prevention will be helped by improving poorly constructed sanitation facilities, shelving, privacy, and staggering/increasing break time for girls to change. Provision of special garbage bins to prevent clogging and overflow of latrines is recommended.

• (Journal Article) Comparative resilience of Somali grain and livestock market systems

  01.03.2022
  Livestock and grain market systems in Somalia’s South West State, while vital to food security and household income, are affected by recurrent shocks, including insecurity, climate shocks, pests and livestock disease, desert locusts, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact that markets continue to function indicates a substantial degree of resilience. Findings from a mixed-method assessment across eight domains of system resilience indicate that the grain market system is more resilient than the livestock market system in three key domains: business strategy, diversity, and connectivity. Results show that grain businesses recover more quickly and are more likely to take action to achieve recovery than livestock businesses. When confronted by thin markets, practitioners have tended to respond by strengthening existing market actors, with the goal of filling critical gaps in the market. However, our findings provide new types of information to address systemic issues and strengthen market system resilience.

• (Journal Article) Impact assessment of commodity standards: towards inclusive value chains

  01.03.2017
  Voluntary commodity standards are widely used to enhance the performance of tropical agro-food chains and to support the welfare and sustainability of smallholder farmers. Different methods and approaches are used to assess the effectiveness and impact of these certification schemes at farm-household, village, cooperative, and regional level. We provide an overview of the results from robust impact studies on coffee, tea, banana, cocoa, and cotton certification programmes. Overall outcomes show rather modest net revenue effects for farmers, small direct income effect for wage workers, and contested sustainability effects. Most impact studies focus on primary sourcing, but devote less attention to changes in trust and governance throughout the value chain. Moreover, implications for gender issues and supply chain trust are not always fully addressed. In order to better understand these somewhat disappointing effects, we discuss different fallacies and drawbacks that affect impact studies concerning commodity certification programmes. Main attention is given to perverse incentives for intensification and specialization that arise from certification. Moreover, spillovers to other (non-certified) farmers and spatial externalities at landscape level may reduce net effects. Important secondary effects related to behavioural change (risk, trust) and local innovation dynamics are usually overlooked. Current practices in value chain development programmes should focus increasingly on dynamic effects of upgrading and improved market integration. New interactive impact assessment approaches (gaming, multi-agency simulation) that address integrated value chain relationships offer promising perspectives for real-time and systematic analysis of alternatives for smallholder value chain inclusion beyond certification.

• (Journal Article) Strengthening behaviour change communication in western Nepal: how can we do better?

  01.10.2015
  The Government of Nepal aims to achieve full water and sanitation coverage by 2017. The bilateral Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project in Western Nepal (RWSSP-WN) works with local governments in 14 districts, aiming to declare them open defecation free. This behaviour change communications evaluation explored how to improve RWSSP-WN’s present practices to reach the diverse target population in the Terai districts, where more than 1 million people still defecate in the open. The study reviewed RWSSP-WN’s present behaviour change triggering tools and related communications strategies. Our findings suggest that availability of subsidies seems to change how people think about sanitation and tends to eliminate willingness to pay for a latrine. We recommended strong advocacy for a no-subsidy policy, and more attention paid to alternative financing options with targeted support to the poorest of the poor. The present behaviour change triggering tools do work as intended, but there is a need to develop pre-triggering and post-triggering strategies to increase the overall impact. The pre-triggering strategy would ensure that potential barriers to change are identified and addressed before the actual triggering event, and that the key stakeholders are prepared for the actual triggering event. The post-triggering strategy is needed to continue motivating households to change via messages that tap into the drivers of change, addressing also the barriers which may keep each household from changing behaviour. This paper provides a number of recommendations applicable for those working with local governments and communities to increase the scope and scale of behaviour change triggering.

• (Journal Article) Educating sanitation professionals: moving from STEM to specialist training in higher education in Malawi

  01.09.2022
  Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires effective changes in multiple sectors including education, economics, and health. Malawi faces challenges in attaining the SDGs in general, and specifically in the sanitation sector. This paper aims to describe the existing landscape within public universities in Malawi to build a framework for training a cadre of locally trained experts. This is achieved by reviewing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degree programmes and assessing the extent of inclusion of sanitation education. The historical compartmentalization of academic programmes has resulted in few programmes to build on. Deliberate investment is needed to build from the current STEM higher education landscape to an effective framework for training sanitation experts, especially female experts. For low-income countries such as Malawi, a cadre of ~17,600 locally trained sanitation experts may be needed, for which the current higher education landscape is not sufficient. Using the Centre of Excellence in Water and Sanitation at Mzuzu University in Malawi as a case study, this paper provides a model of sanitation education in low-income countries that: 1) provides an effective complementary contribution to delivering sanitation education; 2) links to overall SDGs, national policy, university goals, and localized needs; and 3) engages students, faculty, and communities in local research.

• (Journal Article) Child-centred methods for school-based WASH interventions: co-creating sanitation research and interventions for and with children

  01.10.2022
  In 2020, the Joint Monitoring Programme of the WHO and UNICEF reported that, although 69 per cent of educational settings had basic improved drinking water, sanitation and hygiene provision lagged behind this figure (UNICEF/WHO, 2020). This shortcoming is pronounced in rural settings, where only 44 per cent of schools have basic sanitation services (improved single-sex operational facilities), and 34 per cent have basic hygiene services (handwashing facilities with soap and water). The picture in South Asia is more encouraging, but subnational data reveals a gap in provision between rural and urban settings, with just over 50 per cent of schools in rural India enjoying basic hygiene facilities, and 62 per cent with basic sanitation provision (ibid: 49).

• (Journal Article) Agricultural finance that reaches people facing poverty, gender, and age barriers

  01.03.2022
  A high-tech, high-touch, high-impact (H3) approach to agricultural finance enables expansion of financial service markets to people facing poverty, gender, and age barriers to economic empowerment. This article explains the H3 approach and presents the case of Opportunity International’s Agricultural Finance Programme (AgFinance) in Africa. At the centre of the model are community-based farm advisors, providing high-touch/high-tech training in financial management, good agricultural practices, inclusion, and resilience. They also link farmers to financial service providers, input and equipment suppliers, and markets. In Malawi, where Opportunity has applied this model, outreach was high: 72 per cent of clients were living in extreme poverty, 57 per cent were women and 40 per cent youth. In 2021, the AgFinance programme facilitated loans to 68,262 borrowers with an outstanding balance of US$24.82 m. This outreach and scale demonstrates a market systems model – the H3 approach – with deep outreach at scale.

• (Journal Article) Transgender-inclusive sanitation: insights from South Asia

  01.04.2018
  This paper provides insights from initiatives to include transgender people in sanitation programming in South Asia. Three case studies of recent actions to make sanitation inclusive for transgender people (in India and Nepal) are presented, accompanied by reflections and recommendations to guide future practice. Practitioners are recommended to: engage with transgender people as partners at all stages of an initiative; recognize that the language of gender identity is not fixed, varying across cultures and between generations; and acknowledge that transgender people are not a single homogeneous group but rather have diverse identities, histories, and priorities. The case studies aim to raise awareness of the diversity of transgender identities, exploring the needs and aspirations of transgender women, transgender men, and third gender people in South Asia.

• (Journal Article) Sanitation Challenge for Ghana (SC4Gh): motivating local authorities through innovation prizes to achieve SDG6

  01.07.2021
  As part of the UK Government-funded Ideas to Impact programme, the Sanitation Challenge for Ghana (SC4Gh) ran from 2015 to 2019 aiming to incentivize local authorities in Ghana to prioritize resources to improve municipal sanitation services towards the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6. The paper reviews the overall results of the SC4Gh and discusses selected results for the Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) involved. The most notable outcome was that MMDAs involved were able to make significant improvements across the sanitation value chain with limited technical support and no upfront external donor funding. Another important outcome was the empowering aspect of the prize process which enabled MMDAs to innovate their plans based upon their own ideas to improve sanitation services. The prize process was an unprecedented opportunity for MMDAs throughout the country to participate in an international programme, resulting in encouraging results particularly from smaller, less well-resourced MMDAs in remote parts of Ghana who secured prizes in both stages of the Challenge.