Events on water and sanitation

Q: I am looking for an overview of water and sanitation events in the coming months.

Answer: IRC has an such an overview on the Ask IRC page, which includes the Source Conferences and Events Calendar and several other good water calendars. To avoid having to update two locations, I did not copy it here. Please take a look at this page.

If you have an event on water, sanitation and hygiene you would like to have listed, do not hesitate to contact Cor Dietvorst, the editor of Source.

Water wastage in Matjhabeng, South Africa

Q: To who can I talk to report serious water wastage in the municipal area of Matjhabeng? Some valves and water mains in this city have been leaking for up to two years!!! I need an E-mail adress or Fax number that I can use to report this unacceptable state of affairs.
(Resident of Free State, South Africa)

Answer: Did you already contact someone from your municipality? There is a list with contact details available at the web site of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF). See DWAF web site – Contact details for the Matjhabeng Local Municipality

One of the persons mentioned is the Water Services Councillor:
Contact: Mr R Spies
Address: P O Box 708
Welkom 9460
Telephone: 057-391-3226
Fax: 057-352-1712
Email: rodneys@matjhabeng.co.za

Alternatively, you could perhaps contact the regional office of DWAF,
Central Cluster (Gauteng, Free State, North West, Northern Cape)
Ms T Mbassa
Private Bag X995
PRETORIA
0001
Tel: (012) 392 1477
Fax: (012) 392 1454
Cell: 082 806 0707
Email: mbassat@dwaf.gov.za

I hope this will help you further.

Ecosan toilet designs

Q: I read in Source Bulletin issue No. 47, Feb 2007 that “Siddhipur residents are also building ecosan toilets that collect faeces and urine separately and starting to recycle them as organic fertilizer”. I would like to know how this type of toilet is constructed so that we can replicate it here. Is it the same with VIP latrine which UNICEF taught us how to construct?
(Executive director of an international NGO, Nigeria)

Answer: Thank you for your request for information on ecosan toilet designs.

Ecosan toilets are not the same as VIP latrines. They do not require a deep pit like VIP latrines because urine is diverted allowing faeces to compost faster.

Ecosan toilets are especially suited for regions where water is scarce or where deep pits cannot be constructed because of high groundwater table, impermeable soil conditions or hard rock. They are also suitable for rural and peri-urban areas where urine and faeces can used as fertilizer. Ecosan toilets are more expensive than VIP latrines because the design includes two compartments to keep urine and faeces separate, and special seats are needed for children. They also require more training and awareness raising inputs for proper and safe operation and maintenance.

An intermediate solution in between a VIP latrine and ecosan toilet is to collect urine in a bucket (for women and children) and through a funnel in a jar or jerry can (for men) (see http://washhelpdesk.blogspot.com/search/label/latrines).

You can find more about ecosan toilet designs in:

• IRC … [et al.] (2006). Smart sanitation solutions : examples of innovative, low-cost technologies for toilets, collection, transportation, treatment and use of sanitation products.
  
• Morgan, P. (2007). Toilets that make compost : low-cost, sanitary toilets that produce valuable compost for crops in an African context.
  
• GTZ data sheets for ecosan components.
  
• Wafler, M. … [et al.] (2005). Ecological sanitation modules for agricultural reuse implemented by the Innovative Ecological Sanitation Network India (IESNI).

You can further find extensive information on ecosan on these websites:

• GTZ – ecosan
• EcoSanRes: Ecological Sanitation Research

Hygiene education materials to teach in schools

Q: I am working on water and sanitation projects in rural schools in Uganda. I am looking for information on hygiene education to teach in the schools. Do you have information packs to use as aides in teaching or can you advise me where I can get some?

(Sector professional, NGO, Australia)

Answer: The following materials will be useful for your situation:

Khamal, S.; Mendoza, R.; Phiri, C.; Rop, R.; Snel, M. and Sijbesma, C. (2005). The joy of learning : participatory lesson plans on hygiene, sanitation, water, health and the environment. Delft, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre.

The Joy of Learning guide is meant for teachers and others who want to design participatory learning activities on hygiene and sanitation. It is divided into two parts: theory and lesson plans. The lesson plans are organised into three sections: hygiene (including personal and food hygiene), sanitation and water. Each section contains a series of information sheets for planning, implementing and evaluating participatory learning activities on a specific subject. Examples include personal hygiene, the safe transport and handling of water, protecting local water sources, and locally prevailing disease transmission routes.

Postma, L.; Getkate, R. and Wijk-Sijbesma, C.A. van (2004). Life skills-based hygiene education : a guidance document on concepts, development and experiences with life skills-based hygiene education in school sanitation and hygiene education programmes. (Technical paper series / IRC; 42). Delft, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre.

The paper is divided into three sections: section 1 gives a general introduction to life skills-based hygiene education; section 2 gives a general overview of the content of life skills-based hygiene education; and section 3 provides a set of examples of lesson plans for life skills-bases hygiene education. Focus is on primary school children.

Mooijman, A. and Zomerplaag, J. (2004). Child-friendly hygiene and sanitation facilities in schools : indispensible to effective hygiene education. Delft, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre.

This document covers all the stages of a design project, from needs assessment to operation and maintenance. It stresses the importance of active involvement of children, teachers, parents and the community during all of these stages so that they themselves will be able to find solutions for their own problems and needs.

Shordt, K.; Snel, M. and Ganguly, S. (2002). School sanitation and hygiene education - India. Handbook for teachers. (Technical paper series / IRC; no. 39). Delft, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre.

The complete package consists of two manuals. The Resource Book and the Handbook are practical manuals meant for managers, trainers and teachers involved in SSHE programmes. The handbook is meant specifically for teachers working in pre-schol and primary school. It will help them in the classroom to teach children about hygiene and sanitation by using the child-to-child teaching approach.

The books were developed in the context of the School Water and Sanitation Towards Health and Hygiene (SWASTHH) programme in India. However, they provide many useful guidelines and activities that apply to similar programmes elsewhere.

Finally, many successful examples from programmes around the world could be downloaded in the resource section of the World Bank, WSP, UNICEF Toolkit on Hygiene, Sanitation and Water in Schools:

http://www.schoolsanitation.org/Resources/ReadingsSchoolHealth.html and http://www.schoolsanitation.org/Resources/ReadingsLifeSkills.html

I hope this will help you further.

If you have any additional questions or if the above does not provide the information you are looking for, let me know.

How to get corruption as World Water Day theme?

Q: It would be a nice idea to have the theme of the next World Water Day on corruption. As IRC is maintaining the WWD website, I was wondering if you know the right person to contact in this regard.
(Researcher, Germany)

Answer:
(by Dick de Jong, moderator www.worldwaterday.org)

We as NGOs can hardly influence themes of the UN World Water Day, our experience since the start of WWD in 1993 shows. The UN Water people of the 24 agencies involved discuss themes and who takes the lead in the UN system for each year in their closed meetings and workshops. They usually decide on that in the last meeting of the preceding year, but do not make that known to the wider world.

As you can see on our www.worldwaterday.org site they see the forthcoming WWDs as part of the UN International Decade for Action on Water 2005-2015, which was launched on World Water Day - 22 March 2005. The Water for Life Decade 2005-2015 aims to give a high profile to implementing water-related programmes and the participation of women. The UN hopes that the Decade will boost the chances of achieving international water-related goals and the United Nations Millennium Declaration.

Our experience with our Source newsletter shows that the corruption issue is not likely to be raised by any of the UN agencies, as this is not a topic they (or others!) want to profile public attention on. “Governance” as an issue may have a better chance. But this has to be pushed by influential UN officials at HQ and in the field.

Cost of water in developing countries

Q: For my project on water privatization I need to find up-to-date information about the cost of water in developing countries. I have been searching online, but have been unable to find information on this.
(Student, International Business Class, USA)

Answer: The cost of water in developing countries depends on many things. Do you mean the costs for the consumers? This depends vary much on the policy and tariff structure used in the village, town, district, region, or country you are living. However, almost in all cases it seems to be the case that poor people pay more for the same amount of water than the better off.

For example: In Manilla, the poor pay 9 times more than ´regular´ consumers, in Lagos, 10 times, in Cairo 40 times, in Jakarta, 60 times, and in Karachi 83 times!

From a management or policy point of view, it is important to know how much it costs to provide -or to improve- access to water (and sanitation).

The calculation of costs of improved water supply and sanitation, as defined by WHO, covers both investment and recurrent costs. For improved water supply the following elements are mentioned:
- House connection
- Standpost/pipe
- Borehole
- Protected spring or well
- Collected rain water
- Water disinfected at the point-of-use

Source: Hutton and Haller (see below), 2004, 9. In their publication you can also read the annual costs for improvements on a per-person-reached basis

For an overview of these and other issues around financing and cost recovery, please take a look at the following publications:

Fonseca, C. and Cardone, R. (2004). Financing and cost recovery. Thematic Overview Paper. Delft, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. Available at: http://www.irc.nl/page/7582

This TOP provides an overview on financing and cost recovery for the water supply and sanitation services sector in rural and low-income urban areas of developing countries. The first five chapters of the document provide a general overview and are available as webpages, together with Case studies and Mini Reviews of best publications on financing and cost recovery. Within the sector, much of the data used and issues discussed are highly controversial, which reflects many of the knowledge gaps and research challenges ahead.

Fonseca, C. and Cardone, R. (2006). Cost estimates, budgets, aid and the water sector : what’s going on? : an analysis illustrated with data from 12 Sub-Saharan African countries. Delft, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. – 14 p. : 4 fig., 6 tab. – 24 ref. Available at: http://www.irc.nl/page/33109

In this analysis the authors focus on the adequacy of estimates of the cost of providing access to water and sanitation per capita in these countries, rather than how effective or efficient the funding flows may be. This document forms the basis for WELL Briefing Note 36

Hutton, G. and Haller, L. (2004). Evaluation of the costs and benefits of water and sanitation improvements at the global level. Geneva, Switzerland, World Health Organization. 87 p. WHO/SDE/WSH/04.04. [715 KB]

Arsenic removal technologies

Q: I am looking for information about arsenic removal, preferably with images and technical details. It should be as simple and user friendly (easy to use) as possible.
(Senior professional officer, IRC, The Netherlands).

Answer: please take a look at the following resources:

[1] Prof. Richard Wilson of Harvard University maintains a regularly updated page on arsenic remediation methods, focusing mainly on Bangladesh and West Bengal.

He gives some important warnings:

“According to a recent study, villagers seem to be more willing to pay for running water than for arsenic free water. Thus, any solution which leads toward running water is to be preferred. […] Many experts and groups have stopped recommending small scale purification. […]. It is unclear … whether there exist ARS [Arsenic Removal Systems] that work on all waters in Bangladesh and which they are; and if a particular ARS only works on some waters how to decide whether it will work on a particular village water and how to explain all of this to the villagers affected.

Alternative solutions mentioned include deep drilled wells (>150 m), sanitary dug wells and rainwater harvesting with safe storage.

Positive results are mentioned for the prize-winning SONO filter, of which 21,000 have been distributed in Bangladesh. This filter is one of the four technologies approved for "provisional" use by the Bangladesh government, the others are READ-F, Sidko and MAGC/ALCAN.

Technology options are mentioned in the Government of Bangladesh Implementation Plan for Arsenic Mitigation. The annexes can be found in: http://phys4.harvard.edu/~wilson/arsenic/countries/bangladesh/National%20Water%20Policy%202003/

[2] Ahsan, T. (2002). Technologies for arsenic removal from groundwater.
In: Wijk-Sijbesma, C.A. van (ed.) and Smet, J.E.M. (ed.). Small community water supplies : technology, people and partnership. (Technical paper series / IRC; no. 40). Delft, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre.
More information and how to order: http://www.irc.nl/page/1917

[3] Petrusevski, B. … [et al.] (2006). Arsenic in drinking water. (Thematic overview paper). Draft. Delft, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre
This TOP outlines the global extent of arsenic contamination and its basic chemistry, as well as associated health problems. It looks at removal technologies for centralised and household point-of-use systems, and describes two case-study trials in Bangladesh and in Hungary.
You can download the whole document as a PDF, download separate chapters, or read a summary.

[4] Johnston, R. … [et al]. (2001). Safe water technology.
In: United Nations ACC Sub-Committee on Water Resources. United Nations synthesis report on arsenic in drinking water. Geneva, Switzerland, World Health Organization (WHO)

Rainwater collection - how to calculate the volume

Q: How to calculate the volume of a storage tank based on a certain annual rainfall. For our project in Tibet I need technical information on rain water collection, including project design.
(Water and sanitation programme officer, NGO, Tibet)

Answer: In principle, rainwater harvesting is NOT cheap. So, it is either a supplementary source or means with a relatively small storage volume, or people have to be very economic and use more during rainy season and the bare minimum during dry season. If they would accept that then it is a solution. Unless there is a lot of money available. I understand that in your situation, you have a semi-arid condition, so people may be used to be very economic with water.

One option is to collect rooftop rainwater for drinking and cooking, and ground surface runoff/rainwater for other uses. For both you can use groundwater tanks (from simple to advanced, depending on soil stability etc. and availability of funds) and for rooftop rainwater storage an above-ground tank is most common; also to ease the drawing of water.

Calculations
Important is also to determine the volumes people use for drinking and cooking (say between 2-5 litres per capita day (lcd)) and that for other proposes (say between 10-20 lcd).

Using those figures and the number of people you can calculate the amount of water you need per day or month. If you have to collect those volumes all from rainwater (as the sole source) then you can calculate the required surface area and the required storage capacity. Each surface area has a specific runoff coefficient, i.e. the efficiency of collection or the rainfall minus the wasted water. For hard roofing materials the coefficient is between 05-0.9, which means that of each litre of water fallen on the roof you can collect between 0.5 -0.9 litres! For ground surface areas this coefficient is much lower, depending on soil type and condition: usually between 0.10 and 0.25!

Cumulating the volume of water in a diagram
The simplest way to calculate is cumulating the required monthly volume of water (drinking/cooking) in a diagram, and plot the volume of water required to satisfy this demand.

Demand drinking and cooking Q = number of consumers * C1 * 30 = Q [m3/month]
C1 = daily water consumption for drinking/cooking per capita (say 2-5 lcd)
Demand other purposes Q = number of consumers * C2 * 30 = Q [m3/month]
C2 = = daily water consumption for non- drinking/cooking per capita (say 10-20 lcd)

You can then calculate (from the graph, see for an example of this graph the WELL fact sheet on domestic rainwater harvesting). There is not a good indication for the cost as it depends on volume, materials used, location etc. Cost for underground tanks are usually cheaper as the soil pressure holds the tank and the water pressure. Also simple lining materials may be used if the soil is sufficiently stable.

Operation and maintenance
One more issue is the management, and operation and maintenance of the water system; this is well described in IRC’s Technical Paper 30 - Water Harvesting.
If the rainwater catchment is a privately owned system then the house-owner can control use and manage this. If it is a community owned facility the problems are many and conflicts, misuse, mismanagement, are very common and people get dissatisfied and may turn away for contributing to operation and maintenance costs.

Design
There are many manuals/handbooks and guidelines that can help you in designing a rainwater collection system. Both for surface runoff/rainwater and for rooftop harvesting. Below, some of these key references are mentioned. If you want a quick overview of points you could consult the WELL fact sheet on domestic rainwater harvesting.

The specifics of the tank design depend on many factors, including:

• The rainfall pattern; in your case it is a very short season (6-8 weeks) (sounds as a monsoon) and with only a few heavy storms
• Total annual rainfall; in your case also limited 425-500mm
• Available rooftop surface area; roofing material and slope of roof
• Available rock catchment area or ground surface area that could be used for rainwater catchment; and what is the soil type or any hard impenetrable material
• Availability of other water sources, their reliability (volume), availability (seasonality), accessibility (distance and altitude difference), quality of water at source
• Availability of streams, piped water, tankered water
• Number of people to be served
• External and own funding; level/amount of funding
• Availability and Cost of building materials
• Availability uilding skills
• Consumption of water
• People’s attitude towards water use: very economic as water is very scarce to wasting as water is in abundance
• Acceptance of different qualities for different water uses/ purposes
• Level of management and control over source
• Perceptions and beliefs on water quality influences acceptance (e.g. rainwater has flat taste; groundwater is ‘living’ water

Further reading

IRC FAQ sheet - Rainwaterharvesting.org
Web site of CSE India containing (among other topics) urban case studies

Domestic Roofwater Harvesting Programme of the University of Warwick – Development Technology Unit.
Contains much information based on two research projects, see for example Domestic Roofwater Harvesting in the Tropics: the State of the Art, by Terry Thomas, Warwick University, UK (2003).

Various specialised rainwater networks are united in the Rainwater Partnership, such as:

International Rainwater Catchment Systems Association

International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance

SearNet - Southern and Eastern Africa Rainwater Harvesting Network -

RAIN - Rainwater Harvesting Implementation Network - initiated by Bunker Roy (Barefoot College, India). He has left and launched the Global Rainwater Harvesting Collective.


IRC, January 2007
--------------------------
This response has been provided by the WELL Resource Centre Network with funding from the UK Department for International Development (DFID). Since March 2007 the WELL enquiry service has stopped.

Status of the world water crisis

Q: Please send me some material on world water: what is the status of world water, how to prevent water stress, what can be done to prevent water loss, and what strategies should developing countries have to cope up with water crisis? (Professional, Social Services, Karachi, Pakistan)

Answer: A good start for information on the global water crisis is the Human Development Report 2006 which focuses on water scarcity this year. It´s title is Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis. Read the article in Source Bulletin (10 Nov 2006) for information and recommendations, http://www.irc.nl/page/31625 Or download the full report at the UNDP web site: http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/

Secondly, in Source Weekly, 18 Sep 2006, there was an article called Water crisis: global action required, say two new studies. Read the article in Source Weekly: http://www.irc.nl/page/30900 or download the studies below.

[1] Dickie, P. (2006). Rich countries, poor water. Zeist, The Netherlands, WWF Global Freshwater Programme. PDF file [2.56 MB] http://assets.panda.org/downloads/richcountriespoorwater.pdf

[2] IWMI (2006). Insights from the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. PDF file [2.5 MB] http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/assessment/files_new/publications/Discussion%20Paper/Insights%20Book_Stockholm2006.pdf