Water policy, politics, and practice: The case of Kitui County, Kenya

The devolution of governance to county level in Kenya provides a window for innovation in water policy and practice, critical to improving water security in rural areas where almost half of households lack basic water services. In rural Kitui County, Kenya, a number of projects supported by different funders have served as policy experiments over the past 10 years. We apply an action-oriented knowledge framework to explore the kinds of knowledge that have been produced in the course of these interventions and reflect on what kinds of knowledge are contributing to institutional change and how they are contributing to sustainability in the rural water sector. Actionable recommendations for the further development of county-level water policy include: First, ensure local ownership of the policy-making process whilst enabling appropriate technical and legal support; second, take long timeframes of institutional change into account in donor programming; third, establish water, sanitation and hygiene forums bringing diverse actors within the sector together to build cohesion, facilitate knowledge exchange, enable collaborative learning, and deliver collective action

Legal and Policy Change to Promote Sustainable WASH Services in Kitui County, Kenya

The rural water sector in Kenya is undergoing significant institutional change following national governance reform in the 2010 Constitution. Focusing on Kitui County, Kenya, a project location for the United States Agency for International Development Sustainable WASH Systems Learning Partnership, this report outlines the direction of policy change over the past 10 years and reflects on ways in which public, private, and civil society actors are contributing to the evolution of a county water policy that supports sustainable water, sanitation, and hygiene service delivery. To advance along the path to sustainable WASH services in Kitui County and beyond, core recommendations from this research include: Account for the long timeframes of institutional change Draw on legal expertise and build trust for policy experiments in the rural water sector Establish collaborative learning approaches through WASH forum

Science objectives and performances of NOMAD, a spectrometer suite for the ExoMars TGO mission

The NOMAD spectrometer suite on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will map the composition and distribution of Mars׳ atmospheric trace species in unprecedented detail, fulfilling many of the scientific objectives of the joint ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission. The instrument is a combination of three channels, covering a spectral range from the UV to the IR, and can perform solar occultation, nadir and limb observations. In this paper, we present the science objectives of the instrument and how these objectives have influenced the design of the channels. We also discuss the expected performance of the instrument in terms of coverage and detection sensitivity