BRAC WASH offers to help half a million Indian imams promote hygiene

Reblogged from Sanitation Updates:

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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).

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An interview with Babar Kabir on the BRAC WASH programme

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.

Making sense of sanitation monitoring in Bangladesh

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.

Qualitative Information System (QIS) based on Sanitation Ladders

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.

SenseMaker®

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:

• We learn a lot from stories that are being told by our colleagues, stories that we hear from people in the villages. Stories often tell us more than a table full of data.
• However, there is a limit to how many stories you can tell and how many stories we can listen to.  Hence, a methodology has been developed to help us analyse and learn from many stories that are being told by many different people.
• SenseMaker® will help us to understand the average of many stories (the wisdom of crowds) but it will also help us to see the outliers – the first signs of a new trend – more clearly.
• You need to know a bit more about the person telling the story to understand it. Think about a broken leg example. For a doctor it refers to someone who has broken their leg; for a bowler it means that he has bowled a ball with a special kind of effect, and for a gunda (bad character) in a village it can mean that he has broken someone’s leg who did not obey him.
• For that reason, we have developed the SenseMaker® framework. It helps us to understand better who is telling the story and what the story means.
• When we analyse, we first look at what the stories mean to someone and only after that we might decide to open and read certain stories.

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

Renewed research call for faecal sludge secondary treatment options in Bangladesh

Reblogged from Sanitation Updates:

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.

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Bangladesh: BRAC video shows importance of school sanitation for girls

This new 9 minute video shows how BRAC is addressing high absenteeism rates among female students through a water, sanitation and hygiene programme in nearly 3,000 schools across rural Bangladesh. The programme includes menstrual hygiene facilties.

[Female students] have expressed that something so simple like as a sanitary latrine can change their entire educational experience.

The video was directed and edited by Sara Liza Baumann of Old Fan Films.

Bangladesh: School debate on safe water and sanitation

BRAC will organise a countrywide school debate competition as part of its awareness campaign on safe water, sanitation coverage and hygiene practices among the underprivileged population, says a press release. The yearlong competition will begin at upazila level from the middle of May [2009] in cooperation with Brac-WASH and Brac-Advocacy unit.

The objective of the competition is to create awareness among the school students about safe water, sanitation coverage and hygiene practices. The competition will be held in two phases — 1st phase, schools from 24 selected remote upazilas will participate at the selection round and at the 2nd phase, winner teams of selection round will participate at quarterfinal, semi-final and final competition at district level.

Source: The Daily Star, 08 May 2009

Bangladesh: Willingness to pay for sanitation in the BRAC’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Programme

Bin Seraj, K.F. (2008). Willingness to pay for improved sanitation services and its implication on demand responsive approach of BRAC Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Programme. (RED working paper ; no. 1).  Dhaka, Bangladesh, BRAC Research and Evaluation Division (RED). 16 p.
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This study aimed to provide some insights into sanitation-related strategies taken by the BRAC Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Programme from an economic point of view. The aim of this report included measuring and identifying the factors that influence willingness to pay for improved sanitation services for the households without any latrine facilities in rural Bangladesh. A contingent valuation survey was carried out in four upazilas under BRAC WASH programme to determine household willingness to pay and affordability to pay for basic sanitary latrine options. The results indicate that about 80% of the households were willing to pay for improved sanitation services. Of the total households who were interested in paying for sanitary latrine about 92% preferred payment in monthly installments. The mean willingness to pay was found to be Tk. 69 if paid monthly installments and Tk. 825 if paid in single payment. The mean willingness to pay for the overall sample size was found to be within the range of 1-2% of the disposable income of the households. Economic hardship was found to be the major reason for not installing sanitary latrine. Health, cleanliness and prestige were found to be three major motivating factors for installing sanitary latrine. Regression analysis using ordered logit model showed that odds for spending money for improved sanitation services were higher for households with better income, households who believed that unsafe sanitation lead to diseases and households belonging to already intervened programme areas. As programmatic implications, this study suggests that credit facilities along with convenient location of the village sanitation centers are necessary to fulfill sanitation-related targets set by the programme. This study has also established a causal relationship between health awareness and willingness to pay for improved sanitation services. However, it was found that even if all the stated conditions are met, there will be some households who would not be able to pay for their latrines and will need some sort of cash incentive or subsidy.