saniblog.org

Better maintenance and monitoring needed, UN-Water GLAAS 2012 suggests

The Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS) reports on the capacity of countries to make progress towards the MDG water and sanitation target and on the effectiveness of external support agencies to facilitate this process.

The GLAAS 2012 report shows that in many countries policies and programmes underemphasize adequate financing and human resource development to sustain the existing infrastructure and to expand access to sanitation, drinkingwater and hygiene services. Financing is insufficient and the institutional capacity to absorb what is available is limited. The danger of slippage against the MDG target is real.

The GLAAS report presents data received from 74 developing countries, up from 43 in 2010; and from 24 bilateral and multilateral agencies covering 90% of global official development assistance funds. UN-Water GLAAS has been designed in response to the need to reduce the reporting burden and harmonize different reporting mechanisms of UN-family Member States. GLAAS is increasingly used as a tool for more informed decision-making and is taking up the challenge of making necessary information available.

UN-Water The Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS)

Download GLAAS 2012 Report (PDF; 9.4 MB)

Mainstreaming proprietary software formats into dev aid publications

Dear Readers,
as much as I would like to share the following link to a very nice training toolkit with you – a toolkit that has been up online for some time now and recently got an extra section on sustainable sanitation – I am seriously wondering what the good folks at UNEP’s Environment, Humanitarian Action and Early Recovery programme are doing all day long. Probably not anything related to knowledge management & IT.

“UNEP and Groupe URD have developed a training toolkit to assist humanitarian actors to integrate environmental considerations into their policy development, planning, programme design and operational activities. The training toolkit consists of 11 modules, with each substantive module containing a summary, PowerPoint presentation, trainer’s guide, training materials and key supporting documents.” (src)

I know it isn’t good style to publicly criticize others, but producing a toolkit that consists of documents saved in DOCX, PPTX or WMV format just isn’t appropriate in any way. This may work for those in charge behind their desks in Europe or the US, but not out there in the field.

Instead, all documents should rather be in Portable Document Format (PDF). Along with a free & light-weight portable PDF viewer. There are quite a few out there with open licences.  And the videos – how about AVI instead of Windows (!) Media Video (WMV)? Or Theora? And a portable VLC player for MS Win, OSX and Linux.

How many dev workers in Africa are on Apple computers due to the malware threat? Right.

This publication is just an example. In fact, there are many others – yes, even in 2012 – that are produced in a similar way and which make me think that there’s no real passion behind it. This issue probably wouldn’t arise if everything was accessible via the web – which could also be displayed on small mobile phone screen, instead of 48 MB *.pptx files. Maybe we also have to blame ourselves for producing PDFs that can be shared on- and offline, but whose content would be much better in old-fashioned html.

An example of a passionate project is Alex Weir’s CD3WD collection. That’s much more information than any one of us can handle, yet it’s all usable.

What do you think?

Sustainable Sanitation Practice journal, issue no. 6

Our colleagues from EcoSan Club Austria recently published issue no. 6 of the popular Sustainable Sanitation Practice (SSP) magazine – a journal also available as a PDF which is highly recommend as it provides collected first hand experiences from the international sustainable sanitation scene.

SSP should fill a gap that we have identified in the last few years in which sustainable sanitation has become an important issue that is discussed among many disciplines. For SSP a sanitation system is sustainable when it is not only economically viable, socially acceptable and technically and institutionally appropriate, but it should also protect the environment and the natural resources. (src)

Issue no. 6 covers the topic “Toilets”, with reports from Central and South Asia, East Africa and South America on Urine-Diverting Dry Toilets (UDDTs). Download (PDF; 3.2 MB)

Previous issues:

• Issue 5 (Oct 2010) “Sanitation as a Business” (PDF; 2.2 MB)
• Issue 4 (Jul 2010) “The ROSA project” (PDF; 2.3 MB)
• Issue 3 (Apr 2010) “Use of Urine” (PDF; 1.4 MB)
• Issue 2 (Jan 2010) “Operating & Maintenance – Successful Models for O&M of Sanitation Systems” (PDF; 1,7 MB)
• Issue 1 (Oct 2009) “Greywater – Treatment and reuse” (PDF; 2.2 MB)

Practical Guidance on the Use of Urine in Crop Production

In a collaborative process within the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Working Group 05 on Food Security and Productive Sanitation Systems, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) recently published a “Practical Guidance on the Use of Urine in Crop Production”.

This book gives practical guidance on the use of urine in crop production as a vital component of sustainable crop production and sanitation systems. It also includes guidance on how to start activities that will facilitate the introduction of new fertilizers to the agricultural community. This general sourcebook is for professionals, extension workers and practitioners in the field of agriculture, water and sanitation and should serve as a support tool for the development of locally adapted guideline versions.

The publication is available as a PDF (1.7 MB)

water supply & sanitation map in Africa

During a recent trip to the GTZ office of the “sustainable sanitation – ecosan” program in Eschborn, Germany, I stumbled upon the following interesting map that display various international NGOs working on water supply & sanitation issues in Africa.

download this map as a PDF (0.1 MB)

Steffen Blume of GTZ-ecosan, who created this map for his colleagues at work & agreed to share this with us, kindly asks for some feedback in return. So if you’re active or know of an active NGO within the water / sanitation sector that isn’t listed here, please directly send your feedback to Steffen Blume or kindly use the comment form below. Thank you!