General Comments on Background Document

Chris McGahey - Thursday 25 January 2007

Colleagues,

I apologize for coming to the dialogue late, and with what might be interpreted as a backward starting point. But, I will try and catch up with you all over the remaining conference time. Please let me begin by raising some concerns that I had in reading the introductory section of the background document. I introduce these as items that I feel strongly about, and I welcome your responses toward a beneficial dialogue.

1. The document only refers to applications of the proposed indicators within USAID’s health sector programs. A parallel set of programs including, at a minimum, the West Africa Water Initiative and the Community Watersheds Partnership Program (a Global Development Alliance between USAID and the Coca-Cola Company) would benefit greatly from and contribute significantly to the next steps in developing and applying the document and the discussion.
2. Page 4, last paragraph: Please be careful not to mix “water disinfection and safe storage” with “household interventions” per Clasen, et al. There is a great deal of confusion regarding point-of-use water treatment, and HIP is in a position to demand and present clarity. If in the author’s view these two quoted items are identical, then please use consistent terminology. If they are different, then the differences between the two should be clearly presented.
3. Page 5, paragraph 2: To maintain your objectivity, please avoid referring to any brand name products. Bullet number two begs the question of why you did not write “like Hindustan Lever’s product…”. We all know that corporate interests are significantly at play in the field you discuss in this document, and to your credit you are attempting to prepare an objective document. In this light, corporate identification should be eliminated unless necessary to the point being made.
4. Page 5, Table 1: The objective of this table is unclear. There are several more treatment/storage options in use in the field that are not included in this table. If the intent is to be comprehensive, then the objective has not been hit. If the intent is to be illustrative, then possibly sufficient information is provided.
5. Page 5, last paragraph: Is it true that disinfection AND storage efforts have been implemented in 52 countries? I trust the reference. My questions emerges from knowledge that disinfection programs WITHOUT linked storage efforts have gone on in several countries and are often confused with disinfection AND storage efforts.
6. The confusion cited in #5 above is made clear in the first paragraph of page 6. Please confirm that ALL of PSI’s efforts have by design committed to and achieved household use of both treatment AND safe storage.

I hope the comments do not take the discussion in reverse, but I wanted to introduce them before proceeding to delve deeper into indicators.

Chris McGahey

Water treatment vs water storage and inviting other contributors

Orlando Hernandez - Thursday 25 January 2007

Thank you Chris for you input.

The discussion is expected to generate recommendations that can be used by the larger development community concerned with POU issues. Thus, the interest in coming up with recommendations that may be useful not only to USAID programs, but also the institutions affiliated with the International Network to Promote Household Water Treatment and Safe Storage.

If you have names and contact information of individuals in WAWI and in the Community Watersheds Program please provide them to us to invite to participate. You can do that offline if you wish by writing to: ohernandez@aed.org.

One of the intents of Table 1 on page 5 of the background document is to show that there is no apparent consensus on what is being recommended in terms of water storage. I was hoping that part of the discussion of this conference would center around that issue since it would have implications for how household water management is measured.

The definition of effective water management proposed by the background document addressed water storage indirectly (e.g. filters must be covered). The last section of page 10 of the discussion paper refers to the need to distinguish three types of behaviors connected to household water management: transport, treatment, and storage. Treatment is clearly separated from storage. But this separation may not be reflected in the measure of the practice that is being proposed.

One important aspect of this discussion is in fact if we should keep the distinct behaviors separated in the promotional as well as in the evaluation efforts. If so, what recommendations can conference participants make in this regard? I would urge all conference participants to look at the questionnaire (POU Indicator for Annual Reporting on USAID-funded Activities located in the E-Conference Documents Section) that is proposed to measure effective household water treatment and make suggestions to improve it. If the questionnaire does not address storage properly, I would ask all of you to offer your recommendations to improve the deficiencies that you may have in this regard.

Hopefully PSI will answer your question about the focus of their programs. I invite our PSI colleagues to join the discussion.

I thank you for your suggestion about deleting names of specific manufacturers of POU products.