Our project started a WASH program in 2010. WASH stands for Water, Advocacy, Sanitation, Hygiene. There has been a significant emphasis on WASH throughout the country, because let’s face it, the conditions of these aspects of life here are horrible. The villages our project was working in already had some wells, but they were either in disrepair or viewed to be slow in comparison with filling a bucket by dipping it into the community pool of water fed by irrigation canals. The project looked for filter technologies and learned of one organization that had experience in producing BSF and was offering training to other NGOs. A team of our local facilitators attended the training, and upon returning one of the men began to set up a BSF factory. A lot of work was put into making excellent quality steel forms for the cement filter housings, because these housings need to be perfectly sealed and resilient to the stress of transporting. Next our team went to work finding the best sources of quarry gravel and sand. Finally they selected a few skilled masons to begin to learn how to produce the BSFs. I will visit the BSF factory next week and be able to tell you more about this operation after that.
In 2010 our project asked the masons at the factory to produce 700 BSFs, and they did it. How do we go about distributing these filters? I was not here when that discussion took place within the project team, but I am told that it was quite a debate. Several on the local facilitator team like to give away as much as they can for free, but the rest have experienced time and again that projects fail when they give any items for free. The compromise the team struck was that BSFs would come at the end of a health course offered to women. Our female facilitators have put together 5 participatory health and hygiene lessons geared at behavioral change. From the start they announce to participants that they will reward women that apply what they learn by making positive changes to their health and hygiene habits in their house, yard, or with their family. Then the course proceeds, and at the end the facilitators take a “tour” of participants’ houses, in which the participants show and demonstrate the applications they have made with their course learning. Two or more positive changes earns the woman a BSF for her family. There are certainly pros and cons to this method, as with all methods, but this is what our project did for the first round.
So now, in a handful of villages in this wild country, there are biosand filters being used by hundreds of families, and the word is spreading that they even work! In addition to BSFs distributed to villages, the masons we trained received private purchase orders for 31 BSFs- this is exciting because that is a great step towards sustainability! The other way we are efforting to promote sustainability is by monitoring the BSFs that we have distributed to make sure that the owners are learning how to properly use, maintain, and troubleshoot their BSFs. All of these points were taught at the time of installation, but 2-4 return visits for monitoring are necessary to correct, encourage, or affirm the owners on these matters.
We are now working out our plans for further work with BSFs in 2011, but we are leaning towards expanding into subsidizing local sellers/installers, so that we can spread this good technology into many more villages that need clean water. More on that, next time.
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