Wharton, University of Pennsylvania
The Conference will highlight and share best practices and solutions for the women, water and sanitation crisis among world leaders, top-tier universities and companies and to build upon global water and environment conferences to go beyond talk and into action.
To register, go here.
To view the agenda for the event, go here.
While there seems to be an emerging consensus that cost recovery is an integral part of WASH sustainability, it is not yet entirely clear how that should be applied across contexts. This webinar will bring together a diverse range of award winning organizations to discuss payment mechanisms, prices, and profitability for safe water services. By looking through various lenses, this webinar will provide a concrete understanding of the challenges and promising approaches to reaching financial WASH Sustainability.
See the full article here.
Newly launched series, 'It's Africa's Time' reviews the broad-scale impacts of economic growth and poverty reduction interventions in Ghana, Zambia and Nigeria.
The series made its debut on Monday, 18 February 2013 on CNBC Africa, DSTV channel 410, with repeats on Friday, 22 February at 9.30pm and Saturday, 23 February at 10.00am CAT.
A research team from Georgia Tech surveyed five water point mapping technologies; Episurveyor, OpenXdata, DataTap, DeviceMagic, and FLOW. For more information, see their full blog post.
What are other water point mapping technologies in the sector and how do they compare to these five?
Article By Emma Bones, Graduate Research Assistant
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Why is failure so common for water and sanitation systems in developing countries? Why is operation and maintenance such a huge challenge for many governments and NGOs? And, most importantly, why does this statistic still hold (more or less) true thirty years after it was originally discovered? These were several of the main questions driving our research team as we traveled to Nicaragua during the summer of 2012 to test some of the newest and most promising water mapping technologies.
Thank you for sending in proposals to be a lunch presenter at the 2013 WASH Sustainability Forum!
We are currently in the process of selecting who will showcase their PechaKucha-style presentation during this session. If we had enough time, everyone would be allowed to present -- all of the submissions were phenomenal! Sadly, the schedule of the Forum is tight (it's full of exciting, impactful sessions) and we can only have a limited number of lunch presenters. If you submitted a proposal, we will be back in touch with you soon with our decision.
The Measuring Sustainability webinar hosted by GWC, WASH Advocates and SustainableWASH.org this past Friday was a great success! Thank you to all of our participants and to the webinar team. We hope to continue the conversation. Be sure to check out the questions and to comment to keep the conversation going.
How do water quality indicators factor into determining if a water system is functional in the projects where WPYs have been used as a performance metric?
Do you think that using WPYs as a metric may incentivize NGOs or other implementing institutions to directly manage water systems?
Are there any incentives in place with the communities to encourage their involvement and engagement?
Sustainability is not same as functionality, right? The Sust. Check measures whether requirements /building blocks are in place to achieve sustainability, right?
WPY is a UNIT, a (very crucial) representation that can be used to compare/evaluate sustainability. The crux is how are you measuring WPY? What are the details...
Since the Govt. of Mozambique is participating, will monitoring continue after the project, and if so for how long? (indefinitely?)
Do any of the components of the Sustainability Check index drive each other? In other words, do institutional factors drive social ones?
What about plans to share all of the Sustainability Check data back to the communities? Important to get further feedback about what can be done to improve sustainability.
Thanks, Lisa Nash, Blue Planet Network
Have any of the presenters used participatory methods of measuring sustainability? How were the end users involved? And does more research need to be conducted to involve the end user in the measuring tools presented?
How close are you to reaching the goal? Are you on track to meet it? How are the communities scoring?
How do we get the beneficiaries involved in the process and how do we get them to take care of the asset?
How is the method similar or different from the life cycle cycle cost from IRC (as Fontes made a proposal to use the method in Uganda)?
Can you explain how the results of the Sustainability Check (SC) are actually communicated with national stakeholders (government at district, provincial levels etc?) and give a concrete example of something that changed as a result of the SC tool?
How can one use the WPY as an indicator (you require how much M&E, setup that will influence the costs)?
My question relates to the timing of the sustainability check. I wonder what role mobile technology can/should play in enabling the communities to report problems in real time. This question builds on the earlier question about engaging the community in the monitoring of their water service. Of course, real-time monitoring would only be successful if there is likely to be a real-time response to reported problems. I'd be interested to here your thoughts on the practicality of this idea for Mozambique (from a technical, management/institutional, and financial perspective).
The report card appears to be complicated. Who collects the data and makes the judgements, is the database connected to a GIS system, what does costing against delivery of cost look like, and how does it improve sustainability?
What can we learn from the Seattle water company economic analysis for the rural water sector in the developing context - or are they too different?
Are these sustainability tools being used by governments as part of their national monitoring systems?
There is also the running maintenance which can contribute to increasing the life time of the installation. The down side is the cost in maintaining skilled labour over time (specifically for rural water installations). Can we compare the cost in including running maintenace and not?
How important is it for target communities to agree on the dimensions of WASH and environmental sustainability, especially those related to affordability, availability, quality and accessibility?
From your presentation, the Sustainability Check focuses more output (system functioning). What about the impact (long term - effect or change in the lives of people using the water). I think the objective of water provision is to have an impact on disease reduction and improve livelihoods. So if the systems functions well, is it automatic that people uses it? How can we link this to the use of multiple sources of water? Should impact monitoring be included?
How do we articulate the need for O&M to donors? As much as we would all like to put our budget towards long-term O&M of systems donors often do not want to pay for O&M because its not as "sexy" as contributing to a new system?
Follow the conversation on twitter #sustwash.
