Blue Nile, Sudan on-going violence

Barnaby Peacocke, one of my colleagues, is just back from Sudan and gave an update at our ‘stand up’, staff meeting yesterday.

The fighting along the border between Sudan and Southern Sudan continues. This is impacting our work in the Blue Nile and the EU funded project is temporarily on hold. The likelihood is that this state of armed unrest will sadly continue.

We need to work out how in this new reality our work can continue. Our commitment is undiminished.

Listening to Barney I felt particularly moved as when I visited the Blue Nile area, two years ago now, people were talking about their hope following the end of the conflict with the South, they talked of the impact of the war, how some had been forced to fight, others had lost family members, all had struggled to get food, vital medicine, etc. Life had been very, very tough but now there was the hope of a better life and they were ambitious for peace and development.

Now things have changed and we have to continue, increase our work but do things differently.

Thankfully we have a ‘model’, ie.development speak for experience that shows us how it can be done.

In Darfur we’ve worked throughout the conflict; improving peoples farming techniques and yields, access to and quality of water, improving stoves so that they used less fuel – requiring women to make fewer dangerous journeys in search of wood or other fuel, helped people market their crops so that they had money for vital items such as medicine, helped communities preserve foods through techniques such as pickling etc.

After the kidnap of several of our staff and the attempted kidnap of others (thankfully eventually everyone was freed safely, but scared and their vehicles stolen or burned), we decided we had to find a different way of working. All our staff are local and so know the situation in detail – where ever it was reasonable safe for us and the communities we would continue our work directly (sometimes this changed day by day). Where it wasn’t safe for Practical Action people to travel or community gatherings could attract violence we worked with a brave group of people who so valued Practical Actions support they were willing to take extraordinary action.

Village Development Committees and the Women’s Development Associations. Networks we helped established to expand and continue our work. From each village one or two people travelling together, often using unusual paths or routes could get safely through to places no-one else could.

How it worked was that people from these groups would travel to a safe point, coming together they would meet with Practical Action staff. They would be trained in stove making, learn how to grow a new crop, receive seeds, be trained in water conservation, or other support. Help that on a day to day basis would improve their and their communities lives. They would then travel back to their villages and share their learning and/or support with their family, friends and community. Through these networks we were able to continue our work, throughout the conflict, even in some of the most difficult to reach parts of Darfur.

We worked with hugely courageous, brave people in Darfur – speaking to them when I visited their villages I was moved particularly the bravery of the women.

Having met the communities we’ve been working with in the Blue Nile, I believe we will find brave people there, too.

The conflict in the Blue Nile is dire and needs to be stopped. But, if as news reports say, it’s likely to continue for at least the next two years – we have to do all we can to help people caught up in this continue to build their lives.

Our commitment remains undiminished.

Im sorry for the ramble – Ive just dashed this off – but I didnt want to forget how moved I was by Barneys words thinking about the people I met and shared with in Sudan.

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Low cost toilet promotion

Still more than 50 per cent of people in Nepal defecate in the open.

When asked why they hadn’t built a toilet, people blamed financial constraints.

That is because people think only about costly cemented toilet blocks – even though their houses are built using straw, timber and mud. People think they need a corrugated galvanized iron roof for a toilet, even though they are living under hay roofs. They are not aware of low cost options for toilets.

Normally, the cost of simple toilet up to pan level or sub structure is around NPR 3,000 (£23). Actually, the part which increases toilet cost, discouraging poor people towards building toilet, is types of costly structures. That is why when working with communities to improve sanitation, Practical Action promote a ’7 B’ approach while constructing low cost toilets. 7 B stands for the 7 different toilet structures that can be built with locally available materials:

Bamboo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bag (Jute or plastic bags)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bush (Hay)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bricks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boulders (stone masonry)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blocks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blend (mixture of two or more materials)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The core concept of reducing the cost is the use of locally available resources, including material and human resource. It also ensures ownership, sustainability and easy promotion. The other main concept is to ensure people get into the habit of using the toilet. Improving the condition of toilet then comes in the second phase.

Among the 7B options, normally bricks, blocks and boulders are more expensive. However, it is not always true. First class brick is not required for building toilets; it can be built with second class or even built with brick bats. Blocks with higher cement sand ratio can be used for making toilets cheaper. Also, if boulders are locally available, it can also be a cheaper option.

You can find more information about the work we do in Nepal here and on water and sanitation here.

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What is water worth?

It rained all day here in Warwickshire yesterday, but one of the top stories on the news was the hosepipe ban in the south and east of England. We take an instant supply of clean water for granted, because most of the time we have more than enough rain in the UK. How would we feel if we had to carry every drop into our homes ourselves? I for one would think twice before taking a bath!

In the Mukuru settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, residents pay more than 5 times as much for water as we do in the UK – and they don’t have the luxury of a piped supply into the home. Water has to be collected in containers from a communal tap – often some distance away. And, in times of scarcity, water prices inevitably rocket. In many rural areas of Africa, women and children walk for miles to collect water from wells.

In the UK we struggle to reduce our use of water and government water saving advice mainly covers non essential activity such as washing the car and watering the garden.

In contrast, according to this article, Kashmiri children resort to shaving their heads when water is short so that their hair doesn’t appear unkempt. I can’t see this being a popular piece of government advice here!

Practical Action has innovative ways of helping people gain access to clean water. By developing a partnership between local people and the utility company, improved access to clean water has been achieved for many thousands in the Mukuru settlement. Restricting our supply may help us to appreciate just how good (and comparatively cheap) our water is and encourage us to do a bit more to help the 1.3 billion people who lack access to safe water.

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Once upon a time…

….there was a little girl who loved stories. As a little slip of a thing, she used to stand and swing on the garden gate, waving to passers-by in the hope that she could chat to them and ask them questions to find out their stories (she was a very curious little girl). A few years later, her very patient, very wonderful mother would read her favourite Maurice Sendak stories Outside Over There and Where The Wild Things Are to her every night. When she was at school, she’d set her alarm super early so she could wake up and read Enid Blyton books before going to lessons. English was always her favourite subject, and characters such as Elizabeth Bennett, Scout Finch, Jo March and Scarlett O’Hara were as familiar to her as her oldest friends. And then she studied the art of telling a story – for it is an art – during an English Literature degree at university.

Now that little girl (who’s not so little anymore) works for Practical Action.

I am that girl. And I work at Practical Action because I want to change the world. But my passion is storytelling: both discovering a good story, and then telling it in the best possible way. But how do you change the world with a story?

Well, this week, we at Practical Action launched our next five year strategy. It is bold and ambitious and exciting – but challenging too. The targets, both in terms of fundraising and impact at scale, are high.

But that’s because there are huge problems to solve. Right now 1.3 billion people across the world don’t have clean, safe water. 1 billion people don’t have enough food to eat. 2.6 billion people don’t have adequate sanitation. And 1.6 billion people don’t have access to modern energy. Too many people live in abject poverty. It is a world of great technology injustice.

There is no question that this needs to change. So over the next five years we will work towards four universal goals:

1. Sustainable access to modern energy service for all by 2030
2. Systems which provide food security and livelihoods for people in rural areas
3. Improved access to drinking water, sanitation and waste services for people living in towns and cities
4. Reduced risk of disasters for marginalised communities

And by the end of this next strategy period, in 2017, we will have transformed the lives of 6 million people.

That is an exhilarating prospect for me.

Because 6 million people = 6 million stories to find and tell.

Each of those 6 million is not just a ‘project beneficiary’ but a living, feeling, thinking human being with their own unique life story. And those 6 million life stories are 6 million more reasons to support Practical Action, today and for the future.

I can’t wait to get started.

 

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Challenges of urban sanitation

Practical Action has launched a project to improve sanitation situation in the slum areas of Ronda and Kiptembwo in Nakuru, Kenya, which will benefit 190,000 women and men.

Both the slums have very poor status of sanitation, with no toilets available and where they are available, they are used by at least 50 people.

Both the slums have areas where open defecation is common. This creates serious health risks. The project will be pioneering the approach of Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), in an urban context.

Practical Action will be working with Umande Trust on this project and supported by the Municipal Council of Nakuru. The project will use participatory approaches through community health workers to enable tenants and landlords to improve their sanitation system.

This process of demand creation will then be supported by introducing affordable technologies and financial systems. A commercial bank has already shown interest to support the project through soft loans. Currently the project is carrying out baseline surveys and developing monitoring indicators. The project is well supported by the local water company, the Ministry of Health and other NGOs working in Nakuru.

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Walking for water made its mark

I’ve never entertained the idea of getting a tattoo…until last year, at the age of 33, when I went to Mandera in north east Kenya during the height of the drought.

What I saw there shocked me.

People walking an average of 20 miles a day in 40°C just to go and fetch water. And this journey is one fraught with danger. Water is in such short supply that violence regularly breaks out at the few remaining wells – with many innocent women and children wounded or killed.

Most of the time, the water they get isn’t even clean. It’s water like this from a polluted, dirty, hand-dug well that’s infested with all kinds of visible things…worms, tadpoles, bugs:

Unsafe water like this kills 4,000 children every day…and it will continue. With climate change, the incidence of drought is increasing. People will continue to take desperate measures to get water – any water.

Practical Action is reducing the trek that people have to make to fetch water by rehabilitating shallow wells dug into seasonal river beds and building sand filters to purify the water further.

 

I spoke to Nadifa at one of the rehabilitated shallow wells who said she now only has to walk two kilometres to fetch water and feels much safer.

“The well helps my family so much. The water is good because it is fresh. I can drink it and use it for my cooking”.

 

This month, the UN announced that the international target to halve the number of people who do not have access to safe drinking water has been met, five years before the 2015 deadline.

Yet 783 million people still live without safe water.

Today, Thursday 22 March, is World Water Day – a day of the year when we spotlight the global safe water and sanitation issue and the collective efforts underway to get solutions to those struggling and in need.

The issue has made a permanent impression on me. So, here it is:

It’s my own way of honouring a cause that is close to my heart. Any nervousness or reasons to not get it done are easily overcome by the reminder that at the end of the day, I have clean water to drink.

What has made a permanent impression on you?

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The road north to Kilinochchi

I’d done lots of reading and my conversations with local staff had painted in some detail. But I was utterly unprepared.

It takes 9 hours to drive from Colombo to Kilinochchi.

Colombo is the prosperous-looking capital of Sri Lanka, a middle income country. I’d chatted to a man working at my hotel in Colombo. He described to me how Sri Lanka is working for the Big People. But for him – a family man with two kids working 18 hour shifts as attendant and earning less in a month than the rate of my hotel room (a big overstatement, for certain, but we all understand his point) – life is difficult. High inflation of prices for essentials is just making it harder. He was describing a common predicament – large gap between rich and poor in middle income countries – and I felt for him.

But the road up to Kilinochchi is a journey into a different, more complex world. Not simply the inequitable one that I have seen before.

At first, from Puttalam to Anuradhapura, the evidence of conflict is not what you might expect. We’re in the heart of elephant country. A recent ‘census’ counted over 7,000 wild elephants in Sri Lanka. Human-elephant country is a serious problem. Government policies yo-yo between discouraging settlement in elephant passes to intentional development in the areas. I see houses abandoned. The patchwork of rice fields remains untended.

After Anuradhapura we begin to pass garrison after garrison of government troops: A silent, ominous, quickening drum roll. A war occurred here.

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Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils have lived side by side on the Island for over 2000 years. Mostly they have been able to find peaceful co-existence. Throughout history however Sri Lanka has suffered invasions from India. These have periodically stoked popular resentment amongst the Sinhalese towards the Tamils, who share deep ties with populations in India, Tamil Nadu in particular. Tamils have been treated as outsiders. There have been times when large numbers of Tamils have evacuated or been expelled to India.

The British colonial period threw toxic yeast into the mix. In an account that so echoes what I understand of Rwanda, my colleague Rane puts me straight. When the British took control of the island in 1815 they sought to take the power away from ‘trouble-making’ Sinhalese leaders by eroding the institutions on which their statuses were founded. They abolished slavery and replaced in kind servitude with salaried labour. The British promoted the minority Tamils into a ruling class, appointing them to all the leadership roles of public office. They invested in their education, already at a higher level than the Sinhalese, in so doing entrenching this divide and rule order. When Sri Lankan Tamils were not malleable to the plan, the British brought in Indians to do the job. By the time Sri Lanka (which was called Ceylon at the time) achieved independence in 1948 the British had transformed the economy (tea anyone?), turned the structures of power in the country on their heads, and created an environment ripe for ethnic conflict.

Support for Buddhist-Nationalism grew strong. When in power populist leaders took increasingly steps to reaffirm the Sinhalese at the centre of culture and Buddhism as the dominating religion. In 1972 the number of Tamil places in universities was capped and Buddhism was written into new legislation as holding the “foremost place” amongst the island’s religions. Widespread unrest ensued and groups of young Tamils, including The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), called for an independent Tamil state in the north and the east. They established jungle guerrilla bases.

Boiling point hit in 1983 when the Tamil Tigers ambushed and massacred an army patrol in the Jaffna region. The Sinhalese retaliated with a month of killing and looting, now known as Black July. As many as two thousand people were slaughtered, and whole areas were levelled.

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The war lasted 26 years. The war had its ebbs, including an unstable ceasefire from 2002 to 2005. But its crests were horrific. Upwards of 100,000 women, men and children, a large proportion of them civilians, were killed. Over 1 million people were displaced. War crimes were almost certainly perpetrated by both sides, but with no independent observers allowed into the war zones, nothing can be confirmed.

Kilinochchi town was the base of the Tamil Tigers, the symbolic capital of their Eelam. The district was the place of the Tamil Tigers’ last stand to the Sri Lanka Army’s massive offensive in 2008. By the time President Rajapakse declared the final victory of the Sri Lanka Army in May 2009, and a conclusive end to the war, Kilinochchi had been utterly flattened.

Kilinochchi is where I am heading. (This blog was written in October 2011).

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I’m on assignment to provide technical support for pro-poor market development as part of Practical Action’s one-year rehabilitation and recovery project here. I’m delivering training to our staff and a number of other agencies working in the conflict affected north and east – CARE, Oxfam, Worldvision and UNDP. I am the first Practical Action head office staff to go there.

It was as we passed Vuvuniya, after the army checkpoint, that my stomach started turning.

On the final 70 km stretch to Kilinochchi there are more bunkers than other buildings put together. Hardly a single building from three years ago remains. The buildings that stand are mostly the result of the UN’s Refugee Agency: corrugated iron shacks covered with waterproof sheets, and occasionally, newly built ‘permanent resettlements’. There are far more soldiers than civilians. Every road, bridge and irrigation channel has been blown up.

It’s dark by now. On the insignificant upside, there is so little around that there’s no light pollution. As the driver, Bandara, and I take a cheeky pee on the side of the road, I can see the Milky Way.

In the two and a half years since the end of the war, reconstruction and rehabilitation has started apace. Road building, bridge repair, irrigation rehabilitation. De-mining programmes abound. Large scale programmes to return internally displaced persons have made swift, safe and effective progress. ‘Return’ often proves to be a misleading word though, many ‘returnees’ have been resettled in new locations, bringing both challenges and opportunities. All work is led or closely monitored by the government, and financed by the international humanitarian and development industries. Faith-based groups (especially Christian) tend to be at the forefront of putting civil society roots back in the ground.

The private sector is patchy. The biggest companies who are kitted out to cope with high risk have re-established themselves. Cargill’s national supermarket chain, for example, has set-up a new supermarket even before the road leading to it is completely finished. Individual entrepreneurship is also strong. This is a consequence of many not having access to natural resources; traditional occupations on which they used to depend difficult to return to. This entrepreneurship comes in every flavour: Small shops selling small goods; tractor rental; basic eateries; and also prostitution, largely serving the humanitarian expats. My colleague Sampath tells me that in Batticola, another conflict-affected district, as much as 40 % of women who have lost their husbands in the war have entered into prostitution. There’s also a missing middle to the business environment: small and medium enterprises do not have the skills and resources to understand the risks and opportunities of this post-conflict world.

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Practical Action’s project here is called A New Beginning – Rehabilitating Irrigation Infrastructure and Initialising Market Development.  It is funded by the United States government Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA).

The team here is working with recent returnees and government engineers to rebuild traditional water tanks in two locations. The tanks are little more than natural bowls, each around half a kilometre in length and width. The natural edges of the bowls are raised with soil covered in grass, and strategic channels and gates are installed to allow locals to control the flow of water. Maintenance of the banks and the irrigation gates is traditionally carried out by the communities living around the tanks. Rain water is captured and stored during the monsoon and channelled into fields in the torrid dry season. The bowls also raise the surrounding water table, keeping wells filled higher and for longer and create an oasis for wildlife. To me this is a perfect example of indigenous, intermediate technology.

With Kilinochchi in the heart of the conflict zone for the most of the 26-year war, these communities have had to flee their homes and lives, sometimes on a number of occasions and often for years at a time. Families are now returning, but empty handed and often penniless, they do not have the resources to maintain the tanks as they had done in the past.

To get the tanks back into good shape the project uses a common humanitarian approach – ‘cash-for-work’ – offering incomes to returning locals by hiring them to do the work.

As Suganthan, the project’s technical officer tells me, this approach is much harder to use effectively and not necessarily desirable.

Most other humanitarian cash-for-work programs around here are really just trying to shift cash to returnees, and use cash-for-work as a guise to argue that they are not creating aid dependency. In practice though these programmes hardly judge their performance on getting the ‘work’ that is carried out, and care little whether those hired actually work or not. Often they don’t. Workers sit under trees all day and they still collect the cash in the evening. The work doesn’t get done, is it is done poorly and no-one cares. Aid dependency still festers.

The approach in this project is different. We really want the work to be done. The completion of the tank rehabilitation in time for the end-of-year rains will determine whether the returnees can grow anything in the dry season in the new year. So Suganthan calls Practical Action’s approach ‘work-for-cash’. If locals want to work, they can, and they’ll earn something, he explains. “If this doesn’t happen, we hire local construction companies to get the work done.”

In reality around 60 % of the work is carried out by the poor. Poor people spend some time working on the tanks and spend the rest of their time rebuilding their homes and preparing their fields.

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(written a few months later) Now in March, with tanks full, irrigation systems ready and the dry season arriving, the project now helps the locals around the tanks to recommence vegetable or fruit production. These are crops that can bring in income, what these people say they really need most.

Many other livelihood support programmes around here and elsewhere focus entirely on agricultural production and end up panicking when the project ‘beneficiaries’ produce a glut of produce no-one wants to buy.  Again Practical Action’s team is taking a different approach.

We are working with the farmers and other people who work in agriculture to think about the demand for crops in the end markets: local ones, those in Jaffna up north, and those down south and identify what can be done to meet this demand. The team is facilitating a process that enables poor returnees to produce in-demand fruit and vegetables in an environmentally sustainable way and sell them for reliable prices into the markets that want them.

To make agriculture work again for those most in need, the team realises that production needs to be demand-driven and the market system as a whole needs to work well. The team therefore works not just with the poor farmers but also with other actors in the whole supply chain that takes produce from the field to the kitchen table and the fruit bowl. These actors include traders, buyers and retailers. We also work with the people who provide important services for the farmers such as agricultural advice and inputs. Many of these actors face their own huge challenges in this post-conflict situation: they feel the risks and cost of doing business here are too high, they are ill-equipped and have poor skills. The networks and relationships their occupations depend on are non-existent or hostile, as a result of the war and the displacement it caused. If their problems are not addressed alongside those of the farmers, then the returnees’ produce will not find reasonable and reliable prices.

In this way the project is demonstrating the potential of the area and its farmers, encouraging the government and others take seriously the opportunities that exist here and begin to reinvest in small farmers.

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Proud to be ODF

If you’re squeamish about poo, look away now! Open defecation is not something people in the developed world have to think about. But for many of the poorest people living in developing countries, open defecation is not an unusual sight – 1.1 billion people defecate in the open.

The health implications are huge. More than 2 million children die each year from diarrhoea and millions more suffer poor health as a result of poor sanitation.

Over the last three years, Practical Action has been working with communities in Nepal addressing problems to improve sanitation and health. An important part of this project has been to help communities become Open Defecation Free (ODF).

Nepal’s Sanitation Plan has a comprehensive list of points, to be met by a community, to achieve ODF status:

• Proper use of toilets with access to water;
• Hand washing with soap or cleaning agent at critical times(before eating, feeding children, cooking and serving food, after use of toilet
• Safe handling and treatment of drinking water
• Maintenance of personal hygiene (regular nail cutting, bathing, cloth washing, tooth brushing);
• Proper solid and liquid waste management (Availability of bins/pits to collect/dispose solid waste) in and out of the home;
• All households should have toilet and hand washing facilities such as soap, washing platform;
• Availability of brush or brooms or cleaning agent, etc. at the toilet;
• Covering food and water;
• Regular cleaning of rooms, yards, and household compound;
• Availability of managed animal shed and covered waste water pit
• Availability of improved cooking stove/bio‐gas and improved kitchen management;
• All public institutions should have users‐friendly clean, hygienic toilets with hand washing and proper waste management facilities;
• Social map showing toilet; and community committee message/slogan for healthy community

I recently joined a group comprising media persons and other stake holders including local government officials to Sharadanagar, an emerging Village Development Committee to see if Sharadanagar met the criteria to be declared an ODF community or not.

As soon as we reached the venue I jumped off the bus and started scouring Sharadanagar hoping to find waste. But I had never seen such a clean community. All the houses were clean, small or big, thatched or brick. Each and every house had a toilet, not just a toilet but every house had a clean kitchen with kitchen racks and clean dishwashing areas. I had no idea what it takes for a community to be declared an ODF until I saw the list which each and every visitor was keen on checking.

The list is pretty long but at the end of the tour the visitors agreed that Sharadanagar indeed meets all the criteria. I certainly agreed and I know that in no time Sharadanagar will be declared ODF. This is a huge step forward and a source of pride to the whole community.

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Ecological sanitation for sustainable sanitation

2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to improved sanitation facilities. Most of them are from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In the race of accessing the facilities, a lot of pit latrines or improved pit latrine have been constructed behind they are cheaper ,thus easy to promote in low income areas. However, there remains a high potential risk of contaminating the ground water which is source of drinking water for millions.

Practical Action Nepal is therefore promoting ecological sanitation (ECOSAN) toilets in its EC supported project, Strengthening Water, Air, Sanitation and Hygiene Treasuring Health (SWASHTHA). The project is taking place in 21 communities targeting urban poor of four municipalities (Bharatpur, Butwal, Gulariya and Tikapur) in Nepal. The primary objectives of promoting ECOSAN toilets are:

1. Reducing the health risks related to sanitation, contaminated water and waste

2. Improving the quality of surface and groundwater

3. Improving soil fertility

4. Optimising the management of nutrients and water resources

The collection system of ECOSAN toilet is different with the other conventional and modern flush cistern toilet. In this toilet, faeces and urine is collected separately.

Nutrients in the urine are easily assimilated by plants and vegetables. However, the urine is diluted by adding water so it doesn’t burn the vegetation.

Similarly, faeces contains nutrients but there is a high risk of the presence of pathogens. Therefore, faeces can not be used directly as urine. Elimination of harmful pathogens in the faeces can be achieved by dehydration. That is why the importance of diverting the urine is dominant here. The entire process of dehydration of faeces takes about six months to one year. Then it can be used as compost.

It was believed traditionally that faeces has more nutrient value. However, the analysis of urine and faeces reveals that urine has significantly more nutrients than faeces. Urine is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and can be used in agriculture as well as horticulture. The amount of urine collected from one person during one day is sufficient to fertilize one square metre of land. Urine collected from 30 persons for one year is sufficient to fertilize one hectare of land.

Description	Unit	Urine	Faeces
Volume	Litre per person per day	1.4	0.15
Nitrogen	Gram per person per day	11	1.5
Phosphorus	Gram per person per day	1	0.5
Volume	Litre per person per year	500	56

Advantages of ECOSAN:

1.It requires less water than in the flush cistern toilet, where flushing is necessary after each urination and defecation.

2.It does not contribute to pollution. Both urine and human faeces are collected safely. It pollutes neither surface water nor ground water.

3.Separately collected urine and human faeces can be used as natural fertilizer. These natural fertilizers can be easily assimilated by the plants.

4.Improvement of health due to safe and hygienic sanitation.

There are a few limitations in promoting ECOSAN, however:

1.Users need to be aware how to use ECOSAN toilets. Faeces needs to be kept dry as far as possible.

2.People have to handle faeces. Therefore, people need to be educated that faeces is not waste but is a useful resource. Further, people need to be aware of using the compost of faeces and the proper use of urine.

3.The faeces compost needs to be handled carefully for health reasons.

4.There is a cultural barrier in terms of handling human waste

Material cost of an ECOSAN Toilet up to plinth level or pan level is about 8000 rupees (£64). The structure of the toilet can be built with locally available materials like bamboo, wood, boulders, mud etc.

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Making water safe

Globally, a significant proportion of disease is due to unsafe drinking water. This accumulates further in absence of better sanitation and hygiene.

In 2008, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that almost one tenth of the global disease burden could be prevented by improving water supply, sanitation, hygiene and management of water resources. The same report said that 10.6 per cent of deaths in Nepal are WSH (water, sanitation and hygiene) related. It also reported that 14,700 people die each year due to preventable diarrhoeal disease.

Although the Department of Water Supply and Sewerage claimed that 80 per cent of total households in Nepal have access to improved drinking water (DWSS 2010), water quality is a major challenge. As more than 50 per cent of the population defecate in open spaces, drinking water contamination is a common issue.

Water is a major medium for faecal oral transmission, causing millions of deaths globally and thousands in Nepal.

A water safety plan is a tool that ensures the delivery of safe drinking water from its catchments to consumers (“in Nepali Mul Dekhi Mukh samma”).

Water Safety Plans (WSPs) has been taken as a new concept and tool for managing risk in assuring water quality in water systems from source to the consumers. WSPs offer the most cost-effective and protective means of consistently assuring a supply of safe drinking water. WSPs operate through ‘catchment to consumers’ risk management approaches based on sound science and supported by appropriate monitoring. It can be applied across a wide range of situations from household solutions to community water supply schemes to large water supply utilities. WSPs identify the possible hazards in a water supply system with the level of risk, how it can be controlled and the actions required for hazard control.

For further information on our work in Nepal on safe water, sanitation and hygiene, go to http://practicalaction.org/region_nepal_healthy_homes

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