Making Toilets More Affordable for the Poor Through Microfinance

Over a 13-month period, the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) worked with a number of partners, including the international non-profit Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) and International Development Enterprises (iDE), to pilot a sanitation financing program to address the challenge of reaching low-income households with improved sanitation solutions. This learning note presents the lessons from this pilot to promote scale-up in Cambodia and to inform similar efforts in other countries

Lack of community-level improved sanitation causes stunting in rural villages of Lao PDR and Vietnam

Increasing evidence indicates that inadequate sanitation is among the underlying causes of stunting. Stunted children are not only shorter than average: their cognitive development and chances to become productive adults are also affected. Poor sanitation, especially open defecation, still prevails in rural communities of Lao PDR, while unimproved sanitation showed no improvement in rural Vietnam during the past decade (although open defecation has declined rapidly). The poorest living in remove villages of Lao PDR and rural mountainous regions of Vietnam suffer the most from unimproved sanitation and stunting. Our analysis shows that community-level unimproved sanitation causes stunting in rural Vietnam and Lao PDR, regardless of whether a child household uses improved toilets. Thus, policies, programmatic interventions and incentives would best focus on community-wide (rather than household) outcomes and behavioural change. Targeted support for the poor might be a complementary element to ensure their inclusion

Global study on sustainable service delivery models for rural water: evidence from 16 countries

An assessment of rural water supply sustainability was commissioned by the World Bank in 16 countries utilizing five building blocks and a taxonomy of prevailing service delivery models. Results show a mixed picture in progress towards establishing optimum conditions for sustainability. Institutional capacity has advanced most markedly. Financing and monitoring score second highest, with good examples in countries such as Nicaragua and the Philippines. Consistently lower scores are found for asset management and water resource management. Community-based management is still the predominant management model, often formalized in policy, but not systematically supported or regulated. A greater differentiation of other service delivery models is found, with a trend - especially in urbanizing, middleincome countries - towards the delivery of services by utilities, private operators and/or through the aggregation of multiple rural schemes under one management entity. Dispersed rural populations continue to rely on either poorly supported community-based management or self-supply

Labeled loans and human capital investments

Imperfect capital markets and commitment problems impede lumpy human capital investments. Labeled loans have been postulated as a potential solution to both constraints, but little is known about the role of the label in influencing investment choices in practice. We draw on a cluster randomized controlled trial in rural India to test predictions from a theoretical model, providing novel evidence that labeled microcredit is effective in influencing household borrowing and investment decisions and increasing take-up of a lumpy human capital investment, a toilet

Labelled loans and human capital investments

Liquidity constraints are known to significantly impede human capital investment decisions in developing countries. However, it is not obvious whether, and the extent to which, labelled microcredit - linked with the investment by name only - will boost human capital investments, particularly since money is fungible and a label is not a strong commitment. Drawing on a cluster randomised controlled trial of a sanitation microloan intervention in rural India, we show that labelled microcredit is effective in increasing sanitation investments. However, not all loans are used for sanitation investments. Testing predictions from a theoretical model that integrates loan labels provides novel evidence that loan labels influence household borrowing and investment decisions. Labelling of loans - which to date has not received much attention in the literature - is a viable strategy to improve uptake of lumpy preventive health investments

Evaluation of snake envenomation induced renal dysfunction in dogs using early urinary biomarkers of nephrotoxicity

Renal dysfunction in dogs envenomed by poisonous snakes is currently detected using traditional serum and urinary biomarkers such as creatinine and proteinuria. However, these markers lack sensitivity at the early stages of renal dysfunction and their diagnostic accuracy is affected by pre-analytical factors commonly occurring in these dogs, such as haemolysis and haemoglobinuria. Early detection of renal dysfunction would allow for the identification of dogs requiring intensive treatment and monitoring and may help inform prognosis. The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of several novel urinary biomarkers of glomerular dysfunction, namely, urinary albumin (uAlb), immunoglobulin G (uIgG) and C-reactive protein (uCRP) and of proximal tubular dysfunction (urinary retinol binding protein (uRBP)) compared to traditional end points in dogs with renal damage caused by snake envenomation. Biomarker results were compared between 19 dogs bitten by snakes producing either neurotoxins or cytotoxins and 10 clinically healthy controls. uAlb, uIgG, and uRBP were significantly increased in snake-envenomed dogs at presentation compared to controls, whereas only uIgG and uCRP were significantly elevated 24 h post-envenomation. The urinary protein:creatinine ratio was also increased in envenomed dogs compared to controls, but because of the presence of haematuria and haemoglobinuria, differentiation between pre-renal and renal proteinuria was not possible. The results showed that these novel urinary biomarkers may assist in better detecting renal dysfunction in dogs envenomed by poisonous snakes at the acute disease stage compared to traditional laboratory endpoints.http://www.elsevier.com/ locate/tvjlhb2014mn201

On Schrödinger operators with multipolar inverse-square potentials

Abstract. Positivity, essential self-adjointness, and spectral properties of a class of Schrödinger operators with multipolar inverse-square potentials are discussed. In particular a necessary and sufficient condition on the masses of singularities for the existence of at least a configuration of poles ensuring the positivity of the associated quadratic form is established. Content