Working with markets and the local government whilst responding to the WaSH needs of the Syrian crisis

The Syria crisis presents many challenges but more interestingly opportunities to respond differently than our usual WaSH response. Oxfam’s experiences both in Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza and Syria have enabled us to build relationships and alliances with key market actors to either provide water via a voucher based system, and or through direct operational activities with the local water authorities installing reverse osmosis systems, large scale generators, control panels and submersible pumps. This paper therefore provides an overview of these experiences in the hope of building and replicating this further across other agencies, and other middle income, and urban crises

Learning from Oxfam's tiger worm toilets projects

The world is witnessing the highest levels of forced human displacement on record, leading to people being housed in urban centres and camps. Generally the sanitation needs of these people are initially met by external agencies. The long-term costs of operating and maintaining traditional sanitation systems can be unviable when communities or local authorities take over their management. Therefore Oxfam has been trialling the Tiger Worm Toilet (TWT) in peri-urban and camp settings. The aim of this paper is to review Oxfam’s TWT projects and to share the learnings, together with the innovations that have occurred. The learnings are that TWTs are not the solution to all sanitation problems, but they have been proven to work well at household level. Monitoring and documenting the trials has been an ongoing problem due to a number of issues, which are linked to short term funding, and the use of project rather than program approaches