By Sarah Burch

Source: USAID Frontlines, September-October 2013

Keeping water clean for up to 72 hours

Keeping water clean for up to 72 hours. Jonathan Kalan

 USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures invests in fresh development ideas from anyone with a promising concept, rigorously tests them, and helps sustainably scale those that work. Innovations for Poverty Action: $5.5 million Stage 3

Diarrheal disease, a leading cause of death for children under 5, is responsible for nearly 1 million deaths per year in that age group alone. Many communities seek solutions through protected communal water sources, or, if they can afford it, water pipeline systems. But these systems are ineffective when clean water at the source is stored in the household and re-contaminated with a dirty cup or an unwashed hand.

Use of chlorine, by contrast, keeps water safe for drinking for a minimum of 24 hours without recontamination. Purifying chlorine packets are available in household packages in retail stores, but the use of chlorine remains low, especially among the poor. In one Kenyan study area, for example, researchers from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) found that less than 10 percent of households regularly use chlorine, despite the low monthly cost of approximately 30 cents and several years of vigorous social marketing to raise awareness about the product.

Using randomized control trials, the Dispensers for Safe Water program at IPA evaluated ways to change behaviors and increase the uptake of chlorine. The evidence demonstrated that minor adjustments in the way chlorine is delivered have major impacts in uptake. Distributing tablets in easy-to-use containers at communal water sources, as opposed to household-level packets, serves as a reminder and creates public norms around the use of chlorine. A randomized trial in Western Kenya found that 50 to 61 percent of households in the treatment group with public dispensers adopted the water treatment, compared with only 6 to 14 percent in the control group.

With $5.5 million in Stage 3 support, Dispensers for Safe Water is scaling dispensers in Kenya and Uganda, and has plans to add more countries to that list. The project aims to provide up to 5 million people with access to dispensers over three years.

http://www.usaid.gov/news-information/frontlines/open-development-development-defense/chlorine-save-lives

Source: USAID Frontlines, September-October 2013

Modular design allows latrines to fit where they are needed most

Modular design allows latrines to fit where they are needed most. Sanergy

USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures invests in fresh development ideas from anyone with a promising concept, rigorously tests them, and helps sustainably scale those that work. Sanergy: $1.5 million, Stage 2

Globally, 2.5 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. As a result, contact with human waste is a leading cause of diarrheal diseases, which is the second leading cause of child mortality in the developing world and claims the lives of nearly 760,000 children each year. Waste in slums, where toilets are not hooked up to sewage infrastructure, is often spilled or dumped into open waterways, risking thousands of lives. As a desperate measure, residents opt to use “flying toilets”—plastic bags as makeshift containers to collect and discard human waste.

Team converting waste into fertilizer
A team converts waste into fertilizer. Sanergy

In 2011, social enterprise Sanergy received a Stage 1 DIV grant from USAID to establish a working business model that fabricates low-cost hygienic latrines in Kenya’s slums and franchises them out to local entrepreneurs. The Sanergy team then collects the waste daily, brings it to a central processing facility, and converts it to organic fertilizer for use by commercial farmers. With this grant, Sanergy was able to sell, install and operate 60 sanitation facilities in Mukuru, Nairobi.

After demonstrating its initial success, Sanergy applied for and won Stage 2 DIV support from USAID to expand the franchise to service 70,000 slum residents through the sales of at least 700 toilets. The project leverages an in-house sales force and partnerships with community groups, NGOs and the Kenyan Government to sell toilets to local entrepreneurs to expand Sanergy’s sanitation infrastructure and waste processing operations.

Each Sanergy Fresh Life latrine provides sanitation to 77 people and costs only $350 to construct, compared to traditional community toilets that can cost up to $25,000 to build. A single Fresh Life toilet is also expected to generate between $800 and $1,000 per year in profit for the entrepreneur, many of whom operate several latrines or operate them adjacent to existing businesses. The Sanergy model nurtures the growth of a sustainable business ecosystem and offers a pathway to prosperity for local entrepreneurs while addressing sanitary conditions that affect 2.6 billion people.

Sanergy plans to expand its franchise model to operate over 1,500 Fresh Life toilets by 2015. Overall, the waste from the slums of Kenya creates a potential market of $178 million.

http://www.usaid.gov/news-information/frontlines/open-development-development-defense/franchising-human-waste-kenyas

Ventures in Innovation

November 26, 2013 · 0 comments

Source: USAID Frontlines, September-October 2013

Borrowing from the venture capital model, USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures invests in fresh development ideas from anyone with a promising concept, rigorously tests them, and helps sustainably scale those that work.

Reaching rural areas in Kenya, Uganda and beyondReaching rural areas in Kenya, Uganda and beyondJonathan Kalan

Borrowing from the venture capital model, USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures invests in fresh development ideas from anyone with a promising concept, rigorously tests them, and helps sustainably scale those that work.

Several years ago, USAID Chief Innovation Officer Maura O’Neill and Harvard economist Michael Kremer came up with an idea of a new model to help find bold development solutions. Building on their respective expertise in venture capital and economics, they wanted to find a way to harness the power of innovation, and ground it in rigorous testing to create a system with the potential to scale proven solutions to millions around the world. In late 2010, USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures (DIV)—USAID’s investment platform that finds, tests and scales new solutions to development challenges around the world—was born.

 Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) is USAID’s venture fund for finding and testing new solutions to challenges in the developing world. DIV’s goal is to find, test and scale ideas, in any sector and country, that will sustainably and cost-effectively improve the lives of millions around the world.

Stage 1 – Proof of Concept: Projects establish proof that their approach works, and show the potential to sustainably and cost-effectively reach millions.
Stage 2 – Testing at Scale: Investments test promising ideas at scale to gather more evidence of their impacts and costs.
Stage 3 – Widespread Implementation: Grantees transition proven solutions to wider scale across multiple countries.

“What we are trying to do is be a global one-stop shop for a good idea,” says Jeff Brown, director of the DIV program. “We are open in any country, any sector, and to anybody who has an idea that they can solve a development challenge in a more cost-effective and evidence-based way.”

To find the best ideas, the program holds a year-round competition that opens the door of USAID to both traditional and nontraditional partners anywhere in the world, whether a young entrepreneur in Uganda creating green fuel alternatives, a student at MIT building a new business model for sanitation in urban slums, or a coalition of partners testing behavior change interventions in traffic safety. In fact, 70 percent of applicants to DIV’s competition are new to USAID.

“It’s complete open innovation,” says Brown. “If you have an idea, pitch it to us in a five-page business plan and we will vet it.”

As in the venture capital world, there is a realization that not all ideas that win USAID support will move mountains. While some will scale, some will need to be modified or abandoned. To manage this risk, DIV invests in ideas in three stages.

“We go in relatively cheaply at the beginning, and if there is more evidence and things continue to prove out, we will put in a little more, and potentially even a little more,” says Brown.

At each stage, DIV selects proposals that best demonstrate their plan to gather evidence of impacts, their potential to be more cost-effective than other approaches, and their pathway to scale to millions without long-term DIV support if proven effective.

To monitor the success of the projects, DIV selects ideas that rigorously test their social impacts.

“Built into each project is an evaluation component,” says Wes Day of the DIV team, who manages many of the program’s grants. This way, USAID can ensure, for example, that increases in farmers’ crop yields are the result of improved fertilizer use, rather than increases in rain that year. Projects can gather evidence using a range of tools. Fifty-four percent of grantees use randomized control trials, a testing method borrowed from pharmaceuticals to compare groups that receive the intervention with groups that don’t. Others use more market-based tests to build a case for the sustainability of commercial products.

All grantees also test the cost-effectiveness of their project relative to alternatives. By finding more cost-effective ways to solve development problems, the DIV program seeks investments that can achieve more impacts per dollar, and achieve greater good, at greater scale, for less. In one example, a DIV grantee in India is implementing a mobile health tool to rural health workers that allows them to provide better treatment to patients for $86 per year per worker, relative to the thousands of dollars spent by the Indian government to train the workers with the same skills.

While some ideas in the DIV pipeline start small, the ultimate goal of the program is to nurture those ideas that can have transformational scale and sustain themselves without USAID funding, says Kristen Gendron, another member of the DIV team. “We look for ideas that, once proven, will scale to millions through either the public sector or the private sector,” she says.

For example, a DIV grantee can use its USAID funding to demonstrate the profitability of its solar panel business model in order to incentivize investments from the private sector. Or the grantee can gather evidence that its approach to providing safe drinking water is a better way of spending public dollars so host governments invest in bringing it to wider scale.

Over the past two and a half years, the DIV model of open-source innovation, rigorous evidence-gathering, and staged-financing has resulted in over 70 investments totaling roughly $30 million in funding from DIV and its partners in 24 countries and counting.

http://www.usaid.gov/news-information/frontlines/open-development-development-defense/ventures-innovation

Peter Morgan – Innovation for better sanitation in Zimbabwe | Source: Eliza Villarino, Devex, Sept 2, 2013

U.N. officials concede that the chances of meeting the Millennium Development Goal on sanitation are slim. But the story is different for Zimbabwe: according to the latest MDG report for the African country, the goal on sanitation is likely to be achieved there by 2015 “if current efforts continue.”

That’s thanks in part to the innovative work of Peter Morgan, who back in the 1970s, invented the Blair Ventilated Improved Pit Latrine. 

This odor-free toilet was named after the Blair Research Institute, now Zimbabwe’s National Institute of Health Research, where the scientist developed a device that has been adopted in many other countries. Morgan’s portfolio also includes the “B” type Bush pump and upgraded family well, both of which have also become standard in Zimbabwe.

On Sept. 5, the British-born naturalized citizen of Zimbabwe will receive the 2013 Stockholm Water Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. The ceremony is part of World Water Week, an annual gathering of thought leaders on global water issues.

“Many currently existing solutions to provide clean water and sanitation are unaffordable, impractical and out of reach for the world’s poorest people,” the Stockholm Water Prize Committee said in a statement. “As a result of Dr. Morgan’s pioneering work to develop practical water and sanitation technologies for those most in need, countless communities now enjoy safer water, a cleaner environment and quality of life.”

Ahead of the event, we asked him about how the aid community can help improve sanitation and scale up innovation in global development. He also has advice for development innovators.

According to the United Nations, meeting the MDG target on sanitation means “extending sanitation services to an average of 660,000 people a day, every day, between 2011 and 2015.” What can the aid community do to help meet the challenge?

This is a huge challenge, which is unlikely to be met in reality. The needs of the underprivileged are immense.

Part of the challenge must be met in encouraging health and hygiene awareness campaigns fully supported by governments. Self-help will be essential, but by encouragement. Poor people have few resources, and other priorities, like food to eat and schooling for children. I believe small material incentives can help start a self-help process off. A step by step, start very simple with the possibility of upgrading is perhaps one way forward. It is indeed a great challenge.

What role does land administration and governance play in improving water and sanitation?

Ownership of land is important  those who own their own land are more likely to do self-help developments than those who do not. The issue of land is complex. I have much to learn myself.

What do you see think as major challenges in scaling up innovation in water and sanitation and in international development in general?

Many approaches are being tried, only time will tell. [But it will take] looking and examining the various methods which have been tried before and examining them, and re-examining them to see which show the most promise for the future. Global problems with finance hinder much development within the poorer countries of the world.

What do you see as the next big innovation in water and sanitation and international development?

In terms of innovation, yes, indeed, it is widely known that the flush toilet and supporting infrastructure made modern life possible in towns and cities throughout the world.

I believe that the technical answers of the future may not lie in any single innovation, but a range to suit very different conditions. Mankind lives in a huge range of different environments. The answer really lies in producing innovative answers which cover the range of living conditions, but where the possibility of improvement can take place.

In this sector, [it’s] the person who moves the whole sector forward in one giant leap — like the cell phone — well that person deserves the prize!

What is your advice to development innovators?

Use your eyes and ears, listen and look. Ideas are often built by placing together observations and experiences and building upon them.

Keep it as simple as possible. It must be understandable to those who will use it.

 

UP FOR DEBATE: Getting to Full Water and Sanitation Coverage | Skoll World Forum, Sept 4, 2013

At an April press conference, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, held up a handwritten number and announced, “2030. This is it. This is the global target to end poverty.” That historic moment also served to underscore some of the dilemmas actors in the WASH sector grapple with. How do we establish audacious, yet realistic goals? How do we announce an ambitious goal, such as full water and sanitation coverage in a number of countries, and have confidence that we have a reasonable chance of achieving it? This week is World Water Week, and in partnership with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, we asked some of the world’s water experts exactly these questions. 

  • Financial Innovation Essential to Tackling Safe Water and Sanitation Crisis, GARY WHITE, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, WATER.ORG
  • An Opportunity for Transformative Change: Aligning Water Services with People’s Needs, MARY RENWICK, SENIOR PROGRAM OFFICER, WINROCK INTERNATIONAL
  • How to Get to Full Water and Sanitation Coverage, EDUARDO A. PEREZ, LEAD SANITATION SPECIALIST AND GLOBAL PRACTICE LEADER, WORLD BANK WATER AND SANITATION PROGRAM
  • And others

How PlayPumps are an example of learning from failure | Source: Tom Murphy, Humanosphere – July 2013 |

PlayPumps are a go-to example of failed aid interventions.

The merry-go-round powered by playing children pumped water out of the ground. The idea was that children filled with energy could have something to play with that also provided water for a community.

Problem was that it did not end up working out as planned. The PlayPumps needed to spin all day long in order to provide enough water for a community. That meant children and adults were no playing, but walking endlessly in circles to get the water out of the ground. 

The over-hyped idea failed spectacularly. It has been used countless times to illustrate how aid programs can fail. Justin Sandefur and Charles Kenny from the think tank the Center for Global Development, recently mentioned PlayPumps in an article for Foreign Policy to illustrate how technical solutions can fail.

An innovation hailed by Laura Bush and AOL co-founder Steve Case that would use the power generated by kids spinning on a merry-go-round to deliver water. PlayPumps cost four times what a regular water pump did. Aid workers reported that they broke and were hard to fix. And, according to an analysis by the Guardian, it turned out that kids would have to “play” for 27 hours a day to meet the target of delivering water to 2,500 people per pump.

Innovations are important to finding development solutions, say Sandefur and Kenny. The problem is making sure that they are tested and either shelved (if they fail) or scaled (if they succeed). The thing is that PlayPumps may be an example of how an attempt to innovate on delivering water to communities failed, learned and improved.

Ned Breslin, CEO of the water NGO Water for People, responds in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by pointing out that Silicon Valley does not have a monopoly on overselling technological solutions that fail to address complex development problems. Other failed water projects include multi-chambered water filters, superchlorinators, deep-borehole hand pumps, bizarre latrines, and funky hand-washing contraptions, lists Breslin.

The thing is that failure is a part of innovation and the important part is whether people learn from their mistakes rather than making the same ones over and over. Turns out that PlayPumps learned. The Case Foundation, the funders behind PlayPumps ended the program and improved how they addressed the problem of water access.

So what did they do differently? Breslin lists:

  1. Jean Case acknowledged the flaws of PlayPumps with honesty and transparency. She recognized the technology’s failures and took responsibility in addressing the major concerns.
  2. Not content with simply acknowledging the mistake, the Case Foundation pivoted its programming, effectively dumping the flashy technology and instead focusing on a specific outcome: running water for children in schools. This led to the installation of more effective, government-approved technologies in schools, thus allowing children to focus on learning rather than pumping water all day.
  3. The foundation monitored its work, regularly returning to the field to rectify shortcomings and implement new programming.

Turns out that the go-to example for failure is also a strong example for learning. This is the heart of innovation, says Breslin. Silicon Valley will not save the world, but it will teach aid organizations a thing or two.

“The real question is whether ideas on development, generated from non-traditional places such as Silicon Valley, can help push the needle. The answer to that, of course, is yes,” concludes Breslin.

Show diarrhoea the red card: using fun, games and sport to create awareness and behaviour change. Sustainable Sanitation Practice, July 2013.

Ina Jurga

WASH United is an award winning international non-profit that pioneers the use of fun, educational games, sport star ambassadors and strictly positive messages to increase the relevance of sanitation & hygiene and to facilitate behaviour change. 

The paper introduces WASH United and its the learning and behaviour change theory to create awareness and behaviour change for starting to use the toilet and hand-washing with soap. It describes how WASH United is using games and sport at the Great WASH Yatra in India and via WASH in Schools and the impact of these programmes. In the end the paper will discuss some of the challenges.

Using games and sport, WASH United has developed a unique approach to awareness creation and behaviour change in WASH, such as mass campaigns like the Great WASH Yatra and the WASH in Schools curricula. Both have been proven to create impact in terms of knowledge, awareness and behaviour change.

In the future, WASH United is looking for partners interested to use WASH United material and tools, and especially to support “hardware” programmes with cool and fun “software” tools.

 

USAID Fosters Grassroots Innovation in Zambia | Source: Excerpts from IMPACT Blog, Aug 16, 2013 |

What happens when you bring together a fish farmer from Zambia, an entrepreneur from India, a design engineer from Germany, an MBA student from Colorado, and a group of 42 other similarly diverse individuals, and send them to work together with rural Zambian communities to create technologies that will improve the lives of those living in poverty? The answer, as I witnessed at the International Development Design Summit earlier this month, is innovation.

The International Development Design Summit (IDDS) is an intense, month-long workshop that brings together people from all walks of life and a variety of disciplines to create solutions to development challenges faced by impoverished communities around the world. The IDDS summit, now in its seventh year, is organized by a consortium of U.S.-based and international universities led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Reflecting USAID’s deep commitment to greater collaboration with the global science, technology, university, business, and entrepreneur  communities to solve development challenges, USAID/Zambia and USAID’s Higher Education Solutions Network(HESN) provided direct support to the summit for the first time this year.

Loveness Mwanawasa from Zambia and Chole Underdwon from the United Kingdom practice designing menstrual pad prototypes in Kamphelo village. Photo credit: Amy Smith/MIT

One IDDS team worked with communities in Kamphelo village in the Eastern Province and learned that women were putting their health at risk due to cultural taboos surrounding menstrual hygiene. Women in Kamphelo, as well as in many other areas in the world, are not able to speak freely with each other or to the men in their communities about menstruation and would often reuse old and unclean cloths as pads. The taboos are so strong that women are not able to clean and hang the cloths out to dry, increasing the risk of infection. The team designed an inexpensive, disposable pad that women could produce and sell themselves. The two men on the IDDS team became vocal advocates for hygienic menstrual practices, with one becoming more comfortable talking with his wife and daughter in Zambia about the issue and the other proudly discussing the issue with women’s groups in the village.

This is just one of the eight design teams participating in IDDS 2013. In every case, impoverished Zambian communities benefited from the technology itself as well as the sense of empowerment they gained by engaging with the IDDS participants. The participants also came away from the experience with a new perspective on international development and a powerful new capacity to find solutions to the problems affecting people living in poverty.

USAID – Tanzania: Mwanza Using Mobile Technology to Monitor Quality of Water | Source: AllAfrica.com, Aug 10, 2013

A project to map water sources and record test results using mobile phones to improve the supply of water to over half a million people of Rock City is making progress.

The project is sponsored by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Mwanza Urban Water and Sewerage Authority

“In 2012, mWater and UN HABITAT collaborated with MWAUWASA and Mwanza City Council to conduct a study to demonstrate the scientific validity of low cost tests of the mWater applications for mobile smartphones, which maps out water sources and records their water test results,” mWater said in a statement.

The scope of the mWater and USAID project is to work with local stakeholders in Mwanza to establish a demand for water quality information and to build local capacity to map and monitor water sources, the statement adds.

The project implemented under the Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) Programme, seeks to identify innovative approaches to water development. “The knowledge and lessons generated by this project will be used to expand the availability of low-cost tools for water quality monitoring and mapping in other regions and countries.

Water will provide free smartphones, airtime and an initial supply of test kits to incentivize participation,” mWater news released notes. Under the project a mobile phone-based system for monitoring drinking water services and quality is being managed by Ward health officers who have been given the task of effective monitoring the quality of using low-cost tests.

Expected benefits include developing capacity to respond to concerns over water quality and related health issues and improve communication between Ward officers and public health officials in managing the resource.

Water is a non-profit organisation based in the United States, dedicated to using technology to improve access to safe water and sanitation. The organisation is currently investigating the feasibility of installing a permanent water monitoring system within the existing funding and workforce capacity.

The country’s second largest city with a population of over half a million is facing several obstacles including rapidly increasing demand due to urbanisation and population growth, inadequate services in peri-urban areas where many residents still rely on traditional water sources and a lack of public awareness of the health benefits of clean water.

How To Rid The Developing World Of Deadly Bacteria? Steam | Source:  FastCo.Exist, Aug 9, 2013 |

By making water boil at much lower temperatures, scientists are using steam generated by the sun as a way sanitize things in places where unclean conditions often lead to disease and death

Up to 2.5 billion people lack access to proper sanitation. They use “flying toilets” to dispose of excrement, do without bathrooms for hand-washing, and play roulette with unclean medical and dental equipment. We’ve discussed a lot of toilet solutions here, including this one and this one. But waste collection is only half the battle: you still need a way to deal with the material after the fact–a way of killing bacteria before it leeches into the water supply, and spreads disease. Another 2.1 billion people use sanitation systems that don’t dispose of waste safely.

Researchers at Rice University have been working on what could be a wide-ranging remedy: solar steam. By developing an efficient way of creating steam from sunlight, they hope to distribute cleansing technology more widely, particularly to places beyond the electricity grid. The key is special heat-absorbing nano-particles that they place in water. When the sun shines, the particles take in up to 90% of the sun’s energy, producing steam that can be piped off and used in different ways. The system, which has overall efficiency of about 24%, is far more efficient that solar panels, which convert only about 15% of energy when they generate electricity.

Having demonstrated the process in the lab, Naomi Halas and her colleagues have since built solar collector prototypes using a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They now plan to trial those at three sites in Kenya, together with a local startup called Sanivation. The eventual aim is to create a module that any family or village can use safely–though that might still be a few years away.

Naomi J. Halas

The method is so effective that it even produces steam when the water is full of ice, as you can see in the video. The steam is fed off to an autoclave that has a temperature of about 300 degrees Fahrenheit–which is easily hot enough to neutralize waste, or sterilize equipment. It’s a good reminder that electricity isn’t the only way of harnessing natural energy. While off-grid villages need electrification, it should be possible to deliver some basic services without it.