It’s time for another post about Biosand filters. I started writing about these in
January 2011 with this simple introduction:
I went on in the following months to write several more
times about our work with the Biosand Filter, and if you’re real interested you
can read the whole thread here (from newest to oldest):
Well, one of the points that came out clearly in last week’s
WASH forum is that our donor organization (that put on the forum) wants us to
keep trying to get our Biosand Filters to sell in the private market. The new concept is; “WASH Social
Marketing,” which is closely related to another key concept: “Demand-Led WASH,”
which is the opposite of “Supply-Driven WASH.” Are you getting lost in the concept slogans? Basically, the idea is to move away
from plopping down free solutions (supplies), but instead stimulate social
interest and demand in something that the local market can produce and
sustain. Yes, we agree with this,
but, (sigh) it has been more difficult than planned.
Perhaps our biggest challenge is that we could not control
the practice of other NGOs that distributed Biosand Filters (BSFs) in our
province in the past 2 years. They
have distributed thousands of BSFs free, without training, without follow-up
support, and without monitoring and evaluation. As a result, many BSFs cracked in transportation and broke a
brief time after use. Many of the BSFs
had been installed incorrectly, or could not be maintained because no one knew
how. One village said, “forget the
sand filtration” and emptied their BSFs so that they could be used as gravity
water spouts to clean dirty diapers!
This is a classic aid project that has failed everywhere but on the written
report that says the distributed X filters. So sad for the people that needed clean water and didn’t get
it. Now because there are so many
broken and useless filters around, we do not have as much interest from
communities, even though we do extensive monitoring and evaluation and over 90%
of our filters are still in service.
Another big challenge has been that marketing promotions
have been difficult and confusing.
Some communities have misunderstood our attempts to promote an
independent factory, and believed that we were somehow profiting from the
filter sales at the factory.
Clearly, we are now at a point that promotion must be done by the
independent factory mason, not by our NGO project staff. The question is, will he rise to the occasion and work hard
to sell his product? He hasn’t
needed to yet, because the orders that the project buys from his factory have
been enough to sustain him. As we
push for more private market growth, we’ll have to shrink our orders from him,
and encourage him to go after the additional sales he needs. We have marketing resources we can give
him: business cards, posters, radio ads, even a glass-front BSF. Hopefully he will take our resources
and be encouraged to go out and promote the BSF to communities that really need
them. I’m sure this is not the end
of the BSF story…
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