Improving desludging in Haiti by building the capacity of local Bayakou (informal manual desludgers)

This paper presents the work of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to build the capacity of private sector manual labour (locally known as Bayakou) for the desludging of latrines in Port-au-Prince’s Internally Displaced Population (IDP) camps. It looks at the successes and challenges of the methods used to improve safety among a limited number of Bayakou groups awarded contracts by IRCs as well as efforts to improve the quality of their work and their level of professionalism. It also discusses the significant challenges in gaining wider recognition for the Bayakou among the national and local authorities as well as the challenges of replicating the success of the programme among Bayakou working in other neighbourhoods of the Metropolitan Zone of Port au Prince

Evaluation of the long-term sustainability of biosand filters in rural Ethiopia

Point-of-use water treatment is growing in popularity in the developing world, especially in rural areas where the costs of providing centralised treatment systems are higher than their low cost counterparts. One such technology, the biosand filter, has been shown to effectively remove turbidity and pathogens in laboratory and field research but the long-term performance of the filter and its sustainability are not well documented. An evaluation was therefore conducted to examine filters in rural Ethiopia installed more than 5 years previously. Filters were examined to assess filter performance, maintenance practices and the supporting environment. The working filters showed an average E.coli reduction rate of 87.9% with 75.7 % of filtrate samples achieving rates of <10cfu/100ml and 81.2% achieving turbidity values of <5NTU. The varied levels of usage in the three study villages, from 44% to 100%, also highlighted several risks and opportunities for continued active long term adoption

A household water treatment implementation framework: lessons learnt from the diversity of implementation worldwide

Household water treatment (HWT), the use of simple accessible technologies for treating water within the home, is gaining momentum globally. As estimates of worldwide users top 1.1 billion and efforts focus on scaling up existing HWT programs, there is a need to document lessons learned from HWT implementation to date and disseminate them among new and existing implementers. CAWST’s review of current implementation practices coupled with years of experience working with implementers worldwide has demonstrated that while no one standard model exists, successful program implementation shares common factors. These factors have been developed into an implementation guidance framework, focused on five key areas; creating demand, ensuring supply, monitoring and improving implementation, building human capacity, and sustained financing