Quality vs. quantity
Orlando Hernandez on behalf of Mark Sobsey - Wednesday 24 January 2007
Mark Sobsey asked HIP to post the following message in this conference due to the fact that he is traveling this week.
"I am interested in knowing if you are considering other
indicators besides amount of water treated. I am very concerned that we need to have measures of water QUALITY and not just QUANTITY. Poor water
quality causes waterborne disease risks, so measures of water quality are important to consider. You may know that a team of people, including me, is trying to develop simple low cost tests for measuring E. coli and possibly other fecal microbes in water of developing countries, with a
focus on household treated water (AQUATEST project). We are making progress but not there yet with a simple, accessible and affordable test. Hopefully, this will come soon. I am hopeful we can consider this topic for the conference."
Quantity vs....
Julia Rosenbaum - Wednesday 24 January 2007
I share Mark Sobsey's concern about a single indicator measuring quantity - liters of water treated. In addition to his sound argument for indicators of water quality, I also wonder if the existing quaNTity indicator doesn't bias programs towards chlorination (specifically pre-packaged hypochlorite solutions) because of the ease of projecting liters treated from sales data. It is much harder to measure litres treated through SODIS (or filters, or boiling). Comments?
Indicators
Matthias Saladin - Friday 26 January 2007
Dear all,
I agree with the critical thoughts of Mark and Julia regarding the idea of measuring the quantity of water treated. Furthermore, as Hans-Joachim Mosler mentions, we should focus more on the real problem - the consumption of untreated water.
The SODIS Foundation has been promoting several household water treatment methods in Latin America, focussing on boiling, chlorination and SODIS, and including ceramic filters where available. Since 2 years, our main indicator of impact is "percenatage of people drinking safe water in the project zone", where we define "safe water" as water being treated at household level and being stored in a safe container (narrow-mouth bucket, bottles or similar). We usually work on a project base, i.e. we define with our partners the zone we want to impact and then measure the effect of our activities in that specific zone. We conduct a baseline study and at least two follow-up evalutions (usually after 6 and 12 months), which enables us to get an idea of the impact generated in the project zone and of the durability of this impact.
So far, we have made positive experience with this simple approach, which also avoids the complications of distinguishing between users of different methods. As Hans-Joachim points out, many families are using at least two methods, sometimes even more.
My suggestion would be not to worry about quantities of treated water but really focus on how many families (because water treatment is a family issue - typically either everyone in the family drinks treated water or no one) drink disinfected water and how many families drink raw/untreated water in one specific area.
Ideally, we would measure the actual quality of the water people drink, but until we have a good and affordable test kit, I would suggest measuring knowledge, attitudes and most of all practices. If local people are doing regular household visits, it's actually not that difficult to find out if a family is disinfecting their drinking water or not. The indicator than would be the percentage of families drinking safe water in a specific area.
Looking forward to your comments,
Matthias
