The Aquatest Research and Development program is a research and development initiative dedicated to the development of water quality monitoring tools that are appropriate for resource poor settings. The program is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and led by the Water and Health Research Center at the University of Bristol, UK. As an Aquatest consortium member, Aquaya is responsible for field testing technologies developed by the Aquatest consortium with “Early Adopter” partners in a range of settings.

By design, the Aquatest system supports onsite microbial water quality testing by decentralized field staff. In recognition of the requirements for efficient reporting and communication from remote sites, the Information for Community Oriented Municipal Services (iComms) group, an Aquatest consortium member at the University of Cape Town in South Africa developed the Water Quality Reporter (WQR) mobile phone application for communicating and transmitting water quality data as a complement to the Aquatest water quality diagnostic.

In early 2011, Aquaya and iCOMMs launched WQR field pilots with local partners in Cambodia, Vietnam and Mozambique. In this article we describe the WQR application, the implementation contexts in three countries, and findings to date.

The Water Quality Reporter

With the rapid spread in mobile phone use in developing countries, mobile data management applications are increasingly favored to support the decentralization of public service provision. Many groups are employing mobile data tools to support a number of public service objectives, including nutrition surveillance, emergency food distribution and HIV/AIDS treatment adherence monitoring. We are interested in testing the assumptions that mobile data applications can improve the efficiency and accuracy of data reporting in the water sector, and strengthen institutional linkages between field staff and their managers at various administrative levels.

iCOMMs developed the WQR application through an iterative design process that incorporated feedback from field implementations at multiple sites in South Africa. WQR allows decentralized actors to submit water source monitoring data via cell phones to a central database. The application provides customizable forms that support a range of question types including multiple choice, drop down lists, text fields, numeric fields, photos etc. These forms are filled out on the phone and submitted over the cell phone network (using GPRS based transmission) to an online database. The WQR server can be configured to send SMS alerts to managers when data reveals problems: for example, microbial contamination above a designated limit.

Aquaya and the iComms group at UCT worked closely with local partners in Vietnam, Cambodia and Mozambique to optimize the WQR application and configure the menus, forms and feedback loops for each pilot site. In early 2011, Aquaya and members of the iComms team traveled to field sites to train operators, distribute phones loaded with the application, and troubleshoot technical problems.

The WQR implementation partners in the three countries are described below:

1. 1001 Fontaines pour Demain:

A French NGO that works with local communities to install and manage water treatment and vending centers in rural Cambodia. With the support of Teuk Saat 1001 (the Cambodian branch of 1001 Fontaines), operators selected by the community manage simple treatment systems and sell purified water at an affordable price to community members. The operators are using the WQR to report results of a Presence/Absence test for Total Coliform microbial contamination to the Teuk Saat 1001 support center.

2. Thua Thien Hue Water Supply and Construction Company (HueWACO):

HueWACO is the primary public provider of urban and peri-urban water services in Hue Province in Central Vietnam. Each of HueWACO’s sixteen water treatment plants conducts operational testing for pH, turbidity and chlorine residual in an on-site laboratory. In this pilot, treatment plant operators are using WQR to report on-site testing data to their area managers and to the central quality control laboratory.

3. Ministry of Health/ UNICEF Mozambique:

UNICEF is working with the Ministry of Health in Mozambique to support district health offices in regular surveillance of rural water supplies. District health technicians are using the WQR system to report data from on-site water quality testing and sanitary inspections to relevant managers at district, provincial and national levels.

What have we learned?

Through pilots in these three sites we have identified opportunities and challenges associated with implementing mobile data tools to support water qu

ality management. After launching the WQR application, we had to dedicate several months to technical troubleshooting and further refinement of the forms and application based on feedback from pilot partners. We noted that GPRS coverage is weak in many areas, even where the network strength is sufficient for voice calls. In some cases, users corrupted the WQR application through excessive downloading of music and games, and

they often inactivated the application by changing the phone settings. Additionally, users commonly exhausted phone credit through personal use.

Once the system is fully functional, users generally find that WQR is easy to use and managers are enthusiastic about the overall convenience and anticipated time and cost savings. Additionally, WQR has a distinct advantage over traditional paper based reporting because it provides real-time access to data and supports efficient information transmission from remote locations to centralized managers.  This initial feedback suggests that WQR can improve the efficiency and accuracy of data reporting.

However, in order to maximize the benefit to end-users, we will also need to integrate WQR with existing database and data management systems on a case-by-case basis. Currently, the WQR system is designed to output raw data, so we are exploring options for producing summary statistics and advanced reports. In summary, our findings suggest that while the basic WQR application is broadly valuable, the need for site-specific configuration, customization, and on-going technical assistance supports WQR provision as a ‘service’ rather than an off-the-shelf software solution.

Next steps

The WQR field pilots will continue through mid-2012 and support data reporting from the Aquatest water quality diagnostic in these selected sites. Aquaya will continue to document lessons learned and evaluate the benefits of mobile phone applications for water quality management through the end of the implementation period. Look for more news on the Early Adopter pilots of the full Aquatest system, which were launched this month, in the next Aquaya newsletter.

In this study, which we conceived of as a companion experiment to research that Aquaya and UC Berkeley researchers conducted in Kenya (with support from the aid group CARE), we examined the point-of-use (POU) water treatment preferences of 800 households in a densely populated mixed income area of Dhaka, Bangladesh.  We cycled 600 households through two-month trials of each of four POU treatment methods: a liquid chlorine disinfectant, a tablet chlorine disinfectant, a chlorine-based disinfectant/flocculant powder mixture, and a silver-impregnated porous ceramic filter.  The remaining 200 households served as controls.

Household uptake of all the products was consistently below 30% (considerably lower than the approximately 70% uptake that we observed among subsistence farmers in rural western Kenya).  When households used the products, they did generate significant increases in drinking water safety as compared to the control households.  In addition, we observed less microbial water contamination in households that used the chlorine-based products than in households that used the non-chemical ceramic filter.  At the same time, the filter – which did not affect taste and odor – was the most highly used of the tested products (a pattern that is consistent with our observations from rural Kenya).

We offer several possible explanations for the lower product uptake in Bangladesh than in Kenya.  First, much of the Kenyan population that we surveyed intermittently relies on turbid surface water sources that are visibly contaminated, whereas the urban population we studied in Bangladesh has access to improved, water sources.  Second, our Kenyan study region was the target of multiple water, sanitation, and hygiene education campaigns over the years, including the use of point-of-use water treatment products, whereas our study site in Bangladesh has received fewer previous interventions.  Third, we suspect that the Kenyan study population of rural subsistence farmers was more likely to view the water treatment products as “aspirational” goods than were the urban Bangladeshis we surveyed in Dhaka.

In any case, the generally low adoption of these POU products in Dhaka, where fecal contamination of drinking water is a significant public health concern, was sobering. Most theories of health decision-making identify consumers’ lack of information regarding the dangers of untreated drinking water, coupled with product cost, as the central barriers to the uptake of POU products.  Our intervention addressed these obstacles by 1) setting price to zero during the free product trials; and 2) making multiple educational household visits.  Although our informational messages had a minor effect, the overall low usage of these products indicates that POU water treatment products are not likely to reduce the incidence of waterborne illness among poor and working-class inhabitants of Bangladesh in the near future.

You can access our full journal article from the Bangladesh study here.