2 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
The Influence of NGO Strategies on the Sustainability of Biosand Water Filters in Cambodia
This essay evaluates the effectiveness of NGO strategies to promote program sustainability using a case study of two NGOs that install biosand water filters in Cambodia. While the ownership-focused strategy of cost-sharing is the most commonly used and studied, there is evidence to suggest that certain more neglected strategies can have a greater impact. Drawing from nine months of fieldwork, 457 household surveys and five semi-structured interviews with NGO management personnel, the programmatic details of each program are presented along with other factors that relate to the continued use of biosand filters. Through a mixed methods approach this study finds that labor-sharing and monitoring contribute to a significant 15 percentage point difference in biosand filter continued use between the two NGOs. Meanwhile, the influence of cost-sharing remains elusive. This essay argues that the pervasive sentiment that cost-sharing can effectively promote sustainable outcomes allows NGOs using this policy to have a false sense of sustainability. Consequently, other strategies such as labor-sharing and monitoring that have been found to promote more sustainable outcomes are often neglected. Failure to use evidence-based sustainability strategies results in more program failures and prevents the achievement of desired poverty alleviation outcomes
Recommended from our members
Characterization of the feedback between the instructor and student teams engaged in a virtual bioreactor laboratory project
This thesis characterizes the feedback between the instructor and student teams engaged in a Virtual Bioreactor (VBioR) Laboratory Project. The project allows senior-level chemical, biological, and environmental engineering students to apply their developing knowledge and skills in an industrially situated process optimization project. Feedback is an important tool for instructors to use to scaffold student learning, especially in the context of an ill-structured project. An ethnographic approach is taken for data collection; audio recordings and field notes are taken throughout the duration of the project. The characterization of feedback uses an episodes framework for discourse analysis to consider similarities and differences. Using this framework, thematic codes have been developed through a semi-emergent process to describe the content of Design Memo Meetings (DMMs) between an instructor and student teams. Student work products, post-DMM surveys, and post-project interviews are also considered as data sources for this research. The results of this research show that instructor feedback in this project is adaptable, conforming to the status of the student team at the beginning of the DMM. This adaptability is highlighted by differences in DMM themes that are supported by differences in the Design Strategy Memos that student teams bring to the meeting. Student perceptions of the DMM feedback are also presented