Water treatment vs water storage and expanding e conference participants
Orlando Hernandez - Thursday 25 January 2007Thank 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.