On WaterCouch.tv, Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp shares a practical example of international water cooperation that emerged during the 2013 World Water Day celebrations in The Hague, The Netherlands. In one of the sessions, BRAC WASH programme director Dr Babar Kabir explained that his programme had trained 18,000 imams in Bangladesh to include hygiene messages in their Friday prayers (see Kabir, 2010).
Posted in Bangladesh, Hygiene promotion, India
Tagged All India Organization of Imams of Mosques, BRAC, imams
“What is good about the monitoring system that we are using is that it is participatory so that respondents also get knowledge”, says Senior Sector Specialist Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Mahjabeen Ahmed of the BRAC WASH II Programme. Ms Ahmed is one of the 5,000 programme workers who are supporting BRAC WASH II in Bangladesh. From 11 to 15 March 2013 she was in The Hague, The Netherlands, for a programme workshop.
Armed with smart phones, 30 teams consisting of one male and one female staff member have been collecting WASH data in sample areas of the BRAC WASH programme. Each team gets 6 days training in QIS – the Qualitative Information System, a participatory method for capturing and quantifying respondents’ situation regarding WASH issues. The BRAC monitoring teams visit households, village WASH committees, schools and rural sanitation centres.
Babar Kabir. Photo: BRAC
Babar Kabir is the Senior Director at BRAC and programme director of the BRAC WASH programme. He talks to IRC’s Joep Verhagen about this huge programme, the importance of the Village WASH Committee, and emerging sanitation innovations.
Could you briefly describe the BRAC WASH programme?
BRAC WASH II aims for a sustained change —a measurable leap – in personal/family hygiene, sanitation and water safety for all. We aim to create a sanitation and hygiene movement in Bangladesh that is lasting and will benefit everybody. However, such changes in practices (such as hand washing with soap, continued use and maintenance of latrines, using safe water sources or keeping water safe from source to mouth) take time to root. Behaviour change takes time and does not move at the same speed everywhere.
The first BRAC WASH programme was funded by the Government of the Netherlands (DGIS) and over a period of around 5 years in 150 Upazillas we managed to ensure that around 25 million people were using hygienic and safe latrines, we reached more than 38 million people with our hygiene promotion programme and about 1.8 million people were assured of access to safe drinking water. The BRAC WASH II programme is jointly funded by Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands (EKN)/DGIS and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). This programme seeks to sustain the outcomes of the BRAC WASH I programme in the 150 Upazillas of the BRAC WASH programmes and we will be covering the last mile in these Upazillas. In addition, it targets 25 new hard-to-reach Upazillas. In these new Upazillas, we aim that 2 million people will be using a safe latrine and 0.5 million people at the end of the programme. In addition, our hygiene promotion programme will promote safe behaviour to 4.2 million people. Recently, work has started in 73 Upazillas with support from DFID. So in total, BRAC is implementing its WASH programmes in 248 Upazillas and reaching out to 55 million people. That is about half the rural population of Bangladesh. During the last 2 years we are collaborating intensively with IRC who are providing inputs in various areas, including monitoring and documentation. It is a partnership that is based on mutual trust and respect for each other’s roles and inputs.
Over the last few weeks and months, people at BRAC in Bangladesh and at IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre in The Netherlands have been working really, really hard to prepare for our first Monitoring and Learning workshop that will happen at the end of February. Exciting, and frankly, a bit daunting to complete the full circle of planning, implementation, monitoring and learning, and adaptation for the BRAC WASH programme that covers half of Bangladesh and seeks to provide sustainable sanitation and hygiene services to almost 55 million people.
Preparation for this upcoming workshop started a year ago, with a joint BRAC – IRC workshop to design a Qualitative Information System (QIS). QIS is a monitoring system that allows the quantification of qualitative information, such as the quality of latrines, the use of latrines, the participation of women in management and decision making and so on. The underlying assumption is that change takes place gradually and to capture this gradual change we have developed progressive scales (‘ladders’). Each step on the ladder has a short description, called a mini-scenario, which describes the situation that signifies a particular score. The ladder below was developed to measure the quality of household latrines.
| INDICATOR: Quality of Household Latrine | SCORE |
| IDEAL: Latrine with (1) ring and slab + (2) has functioning water seal + (3) no faeces visible in pan, slab, water seal and walls + (4) latrine has two pits | 4 |
| Latrine with (1) rings and slab + (2) has functioning water seal + (3) no faeces visible in pan, slab, water seal and walls | 3 |
| BENCHMARK: Latrine with (1) rings and slab + (2) has functioning water seal | 2 |
| Latrine with (1) rings and slab, but no or broken water seal | 1 |
| No latrine or latrine without rings and slab | 0 |
| Reason(s) why score is high/not high: |
In total, 15 ladders have been developed to capture the key outcomes of the BRAC WASH programme: 3 for the Village WASH committees, 6 to measure the quality of sanitation and hygiene services at the household level, 1 indicator to measure the quality of water resources in the community, 4 indicators to measure the quality of WASH in schools, and finally 1 indicator to measure the quality of rural sanitation marts. More information on the QIS can be found at the IRC website.
Since, the first workshop the QIS monitoring system has gone through a number of rounds of testing and adaptation. A mobile phone application has been developed to make it possible to collect data with a mobile phone. The BRAC team pulled off an incredible effort by interviewing more than 6,000 sampled households across the project area. Right now we are analysing the data that will be presented during our monitoring and learning workshop.
Besides QIS, we have used another innovative monitoring approach: SenseMaker®. This is an approach to narrative-based research that relies on a software platform for data analysis. The sense making methodology draws heavily on complexity thinking but in a nutshell it can be best summarised as follows:
Collecting stories. Photo: Dick de Jong
Grasping the logic of the methodology, making it work, and analysing the data definitely proved to be a challenge for all of us and without support of an external expert we would never have managed. But after developing a sense-making framework, training the story collectors, and collecting more than 1,000 stories our efforts are paying very interesting and insightful dividends. One of the interesting – but very preliminary – findings is that: “The strengths of the Village WASH Committees (VWCs) are its wide community representation and the sense of teamwork. There is little resistance to the participation in the VWC but when it is there it comes from within the household (for women) and from the wider community (for the non-poor). However, we also found that working for the VWC comes both with a level of frustration but also with a feeling of satisfaction.“
This is the first in series of blogs on IRC’s work on scaling up sanitation and hygiene services that last.
Joep Verhagen, Manager, South Asia & Latin America Team, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre
Consultant-led sanitation marketing surveys typically take months to produce a thick report with largely impractical recommendations.
The IRC International Water and Sanitation is developing a field tool that delivers, within just one week, a one-page overview matching sanitation supply and demand.
The tool, a sanitation marketing dashboard, was tested in two unions in one of the upazilas (sub-districts) covered by the BRAC WASH II programme.
Preliminary results revealed for instance that the quality of construction and hygiene promotion needed improvement.
An updated version of the tool will be used in six to nine representative upazilas in the BRAC WASH II programme.
For more information contact: Erick Baetings or Ingeborg Krukkert at IRC.
IRC-BRAC WASH II
Sanitation Demand and Supply Study
Source: Erick Baetings, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre
IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre announces a renewed research call for:
Faecal sludge secondary treatment technologies for challenging settings
This call is part of the BRAC WASH II programme in which EUR 1.5 million will be used for innovative research, tendered to consortia of leading European and Bangladeshi research organisations.
The planned duration of the faecal sludge research project will be 18 months.
The Bangladesh government has reduced its allocation for water and sanitation by around 10 billion taka (US$ 121 million) in the proposed 2012-13 budget. This is 29 per cent less than in 2011-2012. Just two months earlier at the SWA High Level Meeting in Washington, DC, the government had committed to increase the allocation for sanitation and water supply by 50 per cent. [1]
Speaking at a press conference in the capital Dhaka, WaterAid country representative Md Khairul Islam said that the government should raise the water and sanitation allocation and bridge the disparity between urban and rural people.
Economist Abul Barkat, chief researcher at the Human Development Research Centre, criticised the current development budget for being heavily urban biased, with 90 per cent going to urban areas (including 52 per cent to the cities of Dhaka and Chittagong) and 10 per cent to rural areas.
Both Khairul and Barkat rejected finance minister AMA Muhith’s claim, made in his budget speech on 7 June, that Bangladesh had the highest sanitation coverage – 91 per cent – in South Asia [2]. The two experts said the real figure was only 60 per cent [3], while Sri Lanka has achieved 92 per cent in terms of improved sanitation.
[1] Statement of Commitments by the Government of Bangladesh Sanitation and Water for All Second High Level Meeting, 20th April 2012, Washington D.C. Download full text
[2] Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, Budget Speech 2012-13, Daily Star, 07 Jun 2012
[3] According to the latest figures from UNICEF/WHO, in 2010 only 56 per cent of the Bangladeshi population has access to improved sanitation (Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation: 2012 Update)
Related news: Bangladesh: WaterAid gets Swiss and Swedish grants for WASH projects, E-Source, 27 December 2011
Related web site: WASHwatch.org - Bangladesh
Source: New Age, 13 Jun 2012
Posted in Bangladesh, Financing, Sanitation, Statistics, Water supply
Tagged source_publish
The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 8 February 2012
The effect of cord cleansing with chlorhexidine on neonatal mortality in rural Bangladesh: a community-based, cluster-randomised trial
Shams El Arifeen DrPH, et al.
Background – Up to half of neonatal deaths in high mortality settings are due to infections, many of which can originate through the freshly cut umbilical cord stump. We aimed to assess the effectiveness of two cord-cleansing regimens with the promotion of dry cord care in the prevention of neonatal mortality.
Design – We did a community-based, parallel cluster-randomised trial in Sylhet, Bangladesh. We divided the study area into 133 clusters, which were randomly assigned to one of the two chlorhexidine cleansing regimens (single cleansing as soon as possible after birth; daily cleansing for 7 days after birth) or promotion of dry cord care. Randomisation was done by use of a computer-generated sequence, stratified by cluster-specific participation in a previous trial. All livebirths were eligible; those visited within 7 days by a local female village health worker trained to deliver the cord care intervention were enrolled. We did not mask study workers and participants to the study interventions. Our primary outcome was neonatal mortality (within 28 days of birth) per 1000 livebirths, which we analysed on an intention-to-treat basis. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT00434408.
Results – Between June, 2007, and September, 2009, we enrolled 29 760 newborn babies (10 329, 9423, and 10 008 in the multiple-cleansing, single-cleansing, and dry cord care groups, respectively). Neonatal mortality was lower in the single-cleansing group (22·5 per 1000 livebirths) than it was in the dry cord care group (28·3 per 1000 livebirths; relative risk [RR] 0·80 [95% CI] 0·65—0·98). Neonatal mortality in the multiple-cleansing group (26·6 per 1000 livebirths) was not statistically significantly lower than it was in the dry cord care group (RR 0·94 [0·78—1·14]). Compared with the dry cord care group, we recorded a statistically significant reduction in the occurrence of severe cord infection (redness with pus) in the multiple-cleansing group (risk per 1000 livebirths=4·2 vs risk per 1000 livebirths=1·2; RR 0·35 [0·15—0·81]) but not in the single-cleansing group (risk per 1000 livebirths=3·3; RR 0·77 [0·40—1·48]).
Interpretation – Chlorhexidine cleansing of a neonate’s umbilical cord can save lives, but further studies are needed to establish the best frequency with which to deliver the intervention.
WaterAid has signed funding agreements with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) for two WASH projects in Bangladesh.
Photo: WaterAid/ Abir Abdullah & ASM Shafiqur Rahman
SDC and WaterAid signed a grant agreement on 30 November 2011 for a 316 million Taka (US$ 3.84 million) three year rural WASH programme. SDC will provide 265.5 million Taka (US$ 3.23 million), and WaterAid the rest. If successful, SDC will extend support for another 3 years.
Most of the funding will go the ‘Promotion of water supply, sanitation and hygiene in hard -to-reach areas of rural Bangladesh’ project, which aims to provide safe drinking water to 500,000 rural people, latrines to 1.3 million and hygiene education to another 1 million people. WaterAid’s inclusion and climate change programmes will also benefit.
Posted in Bangladesh, Financing, Hygiene promotion, On-site sanitation, Rural WASH, Urban WASH, Water supply
Tagged SDC, Sida, WaterAid Bangladesh
Contamination of deep groundwater with arsenic from shallower sources may not be as serious as feared — if pumping deep water is limited to domestic use, a study has found.
Exposure to arsenic-contaminated groundwater has been linked to almost one in every five deaths in Bangladesh, and some 100,000 deep wells have been constructed to pump deeper, cleaner water. Recent modelling studies have suggested that these cleaner water sources are also being contaminated — from shallower water seeping down to replenish deeper wells.
But a study published in Nature Geoscience [doi: 10.1038/ngeo1283] found that natural adsorption of arsenic by sediment — sand in the aquifers — reduces contamination risk in most areas.
The study was conducted as part of the Columbia University Superfund Research Program on the “Health Effects and Geochemistry of Arsenic and Manganese“.
Read more [Syful Islam, SciDev.Net, 10 Oct 2011]
Posted in Bangladesh, Research, Water quality
Tagged arsenic, deep wells, groundwater pollution
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