Water and wastewater utilities are likely to be challenged by the effects of climate change in ways that go beyond the rising global temperatures and associated sea level rise. The physical models currently available predict vast and non-uniform changes in precipitation across the globe, with some regions getting wetter and others getting dryer. Model results also point to increases in the frequency of extreme climatic events such as floods and droughts. Meanwhile, familiar seasonal patterns of precipitation are already showing signs of shifts, with potentially dire consequences for water availability.

Water and wastewater infrastructure are vulnerable to these changes, with risks highest among utilities that are financially struggling, particularly in the developing world:

Indeed, water utilities in
 the developing world are still struggling with old and persistent problems of water management and sustainable delivery of services … the importance of forward-looking approaches to the climate challenge is greater for the institutionally and financially weak utilities.

Danilenko et. al (2010)

World Bank Water Working Note #24

Climate change and urban water utilities: challenges & opportunities

A recent World Bank analysis of the climate change threats faced by water utilities points out that service providers in wealthier nations “are now beginning to identify strategic policy directions based on monitoring, analysis and the global circulation models (GCM) of possible climate change scenarios” (Danilenko et al, 2010).

At the same time, planning for these changes is extraordinarily complex. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council recognized in a 2011 report that American “water sector utilities are overwhelmed with climate change information and lack of coordination by federal agencies, state agencies, and other water sector actors…[and] water utility officials are struggling with the number and volume of climate change studies being produced by many different federal and state agencies, water associations, universities, and other organizations.” EPA’s Climate Ready Water Utilities initiative now administers an online toolbox that provides extensive resources, ranging from publications and reports to tools and models and even funding opportunities.

Though climate change is happening at global scale, its effects will manifest themselves locally. An essential part of planning for the challenges of global warming is assessment of the vulnerability of individual utilities, which is in turn a function of both specific local and regional risks and the institutional capacity to operate effectively in the face of climate uncertainty. Vulnerability assessment requires, among other tasks, long-term data collection.

Aquaya’s work to improve data collection and management by water utilities is intended to improve operational performance, but an important additional benefit will be to help utilities adapt to regional changes in climate. The more that utilities understand and optimize their current operations, the more prepared they will be to adjust to changes in water availability, quality, and demand that a changing climate will bring.

Unfortunately, the targeted populations – low-income strata who are the least likely to be served by municipal water utilities and the most vulnerable to waterborne illness – often prove to be very difficult customers. Getting these populations to consistently use home filters and disinfectants – let alone purchase them with their own money – has proven to be a mighty challenge.

Aquaya recognized early on that the health benefits identified in early health trials of ceramic filters and chlorine disinfectants could only be realized on a grand scale when the proponents of these new technologies had a full understanding of consumer preferences and behavior vis-à-vis household water treatment products. Together with colleagues at UC Berkeley, we initiated a research program in western Kenya to better understand what influences end-user adoption of these technologies. The results of our first study was recognized as one of the top papers of 2010 by Environmental Science and Technology, and in May 2012 the journal published some results from a follow-on study we conducted with colleagues from the renowned International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research – Bangladesh (ICCDR,B). “Learning to Dislike Safe Water Products: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of Direct and Peer Experience on Willingness to Pay” (Vol. 46, pp.6244-6251) provides a sobering picture of the challenge of achieving widespread uptake of home water treatment products.

In a study of 800 households in the large informal settlement of Mirpur in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we examined how direct and peer experience with multiple household water treatment products influenced consumer demand. Contrary to expectation, we observed that neither direct experience with these products and the experience of neighbors elevated willingness-to-pay. Instead, those households which received two-month free trials of three different products were less willing to pay for these products than control households which received no such trials.

While we caution that these results are not necessarily generalizable to other geographic settings, urban informal settlements in South Asia do live with a large fraction of the global burden of diarrhea. That experience with home water treatment products appeared to make consumers less likely to purchase these products forces a serious re-thinking of how to bring safe water to these populations, including a consideration of other delivery options (whether via expansion of municipal water services or neighborhood-level water treatment and vending operations.

Women collect water from a community water point. Malawi.

Can mobile phones solve the world’s water crisis? This is a big question that my colleagues and I are exploring at Aquaya. The global water crisis affects all countries, rich and poor, and spans many issues that range from the availability and sustainability of water resources to their safety for public health. At Aquaya, we focus on water and public health: infants and children are especially vulnerable to waterborne diseases like diarrhea, and according to the World Health Organization, unsafe water is responsible for approximately 2.0 million child deaths a year, more than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.

In March 2012, the United Nations announced that at a global level the Millennium Development Goal for access to improved drinking water has been met; 89% of the world’s population, 6.1 billion people, now use improved drinking water sources. But thousands of these improved water systems don’t deliver safe drinking water and many more break down each year.

How can we improve the reliability and safety of drinking water supplies? A lot of hard work and research by many people has taught us that more and better infrastructure is just not enough: ongoing oversight of water systems by trained professionals is also important. But this support is hard to provide. Government institutions are often highly centralized, financially constrained, and geographically overstretched. We need simple tools to improve communication between local community water managers and their support agencies in order to promote the efficient use of existing management resources.

This is where mobile phones come in to the picture. Mobile phones are cheap, easy to use and nearly ubiquitous in countries like Ecuador, Vietnam and Mozambique, where we work. Most importantly, mobile phones can transmit multiple types of information – including images and GPS points – cheaply and quickly over long distances.

In October 2011, I traveled with colleagues from UNICEF to Chimoio, a mid-sized hill town in Southern Mozambique that is close to the border with Zimbabwe. UNICEF is collaborating with the Government of Mozambique to develop and maintain hand pumps, which are the primary water sources for rural villagers. We were there to show district health technicians how to use mobile phones to send information on pump status and water quality to their regional and national level supervisors. The mobile phone app that we used for sending this information is called Water Quality Reporter, and it was developed by the iComms Group at the University of Cape Town in South Africa as a reporting tool that runs on basic mobile feature phones.

Training district health officers in Mozambique

The district health technicians are on the road constantly; so much so that we had to travel between towns to try and catch them on the road. Each week they travel for hours on unpaved roads to communities of under 100 people to inspect drinking water sources, provide technical support to community water system managers and provide health education lessons to the community.

The district technicians have long had responsibility for monitoring drinking water sources, but the information that they collect generally stays in their logbooks and is rarely reported to their superiors. However, the technicians need resources and technical support from their managers to fix broken pumps and treat contaminated water. We wanted to find out if instant reporting through the Water Quality Reporter would make everyone more responsive to water supply problems.

A few months after training the technicians to use Water Quality Reporter, we saw some concrete changes. The Director of the Ministry of Health’s national laboratory issued formal memos to the local Government, asking them to respond to the high levels of contamination reported from a number of the district’s water supplies. In her letters, the Director noted that many rural supplies are ‘improper for human consumption’ and provided technical guidance on determining the source of the contaminants (mainly bacteria and nitrites) and on how to take action. For local governments that are juggling competing priorities, this kind of guidance and accountability is critical.

As in Mozambique, we have observed poor information flows between field staff and institutional managers in many other countries. For example, environmental health technicians in Ecuador regularly send water samples by bus to a Ministry of Health laboratory in Quito, but they rarely receive the test results. Without this feedback loop, the technicians can’t use the data to inform their health promotion activities – things like hygiene education in schools and delivery of chlorine to water system operators. A mobile phone based data sharing system would allow these technicians to efficiently share field information with managers and receive water quality test results.

Fortunately, a number of groups working in the water sector have caught on to the potential of mobile phones for improving the reliability and safety of water supplies. Some NGOs are now incorporating mobile data collection into their project monitoring surveys and creating dynamic websites to share results with donors and other stakeholders.

But it is also important to remember that implementing mobile phone solutions in low-resource settings is not without challenges: though mobile phone coverage is rapidly growing, the networks are generally weakest in the places where information flows are the most critical. In addition, management procedures must be in place for things like lost or broken phones, topping off phone credit, network configurations, and new user training.

At Aquaya we’re optimistic that although mobile phones may not address all aspects of the global water crisis, they will be important tools for managing many challenges. We are exploring other exciting ways to use mobile technology to support safe water delivery; these include bulk SMS messages for public service announcements and customer alerts (like a boil alert when contamination is detected in a utility network), public submission of complaints and status reports, and automated, dynamic data analysis for managers.

Although the developing world is changing rapidly, particularly through urbanization, much of the urban growth, especially in Africa, is in small and medium sized towns. As a result strategies for linking geographically dispersed actors to support and regulatory agencies remain critical. In his annual report last year, Engineer Robert Gakubia, the CEO of the Kenya Water Services Regulatory Board summed it up with the following comment: “There is no transparency without information, which means that information is key to good governance. Information helps Water Service Providers and customers improve access to water services”.

Included below are the slides that were presented.  And as promised, here is the link to the Sierra Leone Water Report — a writeup of the 2012 audit of all public improved water points in the country (over 28,000).

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have questions or would like to talk more about the ideas presented here.

Data Collection and Analysis in WASH

Safe water quality will become sub-Saharan Africa’s next challenge

San Francisco, Calif.—The Aquaya Institute announced today it has received a $3.7 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund its groundbreaking Monitoring for Safe Water program.

Monitoring for Safe Water is the first major effort to identify best policies and practices for increasing and improving water quality testing for African water suppliers and surveillance agencies.

Access to drinking water in sub-Saharan developing countries has improved significantly over the past several years,” said Dr. Ranjiv Khush, co-founder and executive director of the Aquaya Institute. “But data on water quality is scarce and incomplete because testing is not prioritized.”

Water quality testing is important because contaminated drinking water is a primary cause of infant diarrhea, which is still a leading cause of death among children under five in the developing world.

“More children die of diarrhea than from HIV/AIDS and malaria combined,” Khush explains. “Efforts to improve water quality, either by treating water supplies or by reducing contamination through better sanitation and hygiene, should be the focus.”

Most African countries mandate water quality testing by both water suppliers and public health surveillance agencies, but enforcement remains an issue.

“The lack of data has two major consequences. First, we don’t know where the water quality problems are, and second, we don’t know how well safe water programs are working,”

Monitoring for Safe Water aims to address these issues by achieving two goals:

• Determine why testing by water suppliers and public health surveillance agencies fails to meet regulatory requirements in most settings.
• Develop strategies to increase regulated water quality testing.

This grant will help focus research on sub-Saharan Africa where Aquaya will work in at least five countries with five to six water suppliers and agencies per country.

“Improving and targeting safe water programs will improve global public health, particularly by reducing infant disease and death,” Khush said.

Aquaya is also partnering with the International Water Association (IWA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to coordinate the Monitoring for Safe Water program.

For more information visit www.aquaya.org

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About: The Aquaya Institute is a research and consulting organization founded in 2005 by scientists intent on bridging the divide between academic research and the field implementation of safe water programs in the developing world. Aquaya designs new products and services, identifies successful delivery models, and measures the health and socioeconomic impacts of water and sanitation programs.

In a follow up to the New York Times story, Ranjiv also participated in a panel discussion on bottled water on Patt Morrison’s magazine show on Southern California Public Radio (KPCC). You can download the podcast via the KPCC website or iTunes (the discussion begins at minute 47:25 of the July 18, 2012 show ).

To develop a comprehensive understanding of microbial water testing and technical requirements among a global range of potential end-users, Aquaya is currently managing field pilots of Aquatest with water providers, public health surveillance agencies, research institutions and NGOs organizations in 14 developing countries across South America, Asia and Africa.  We are also working in Alberta, Canada to determine whether Aquatest is suitable for remote water testing in developed countries.

Among water providers, our partners range from the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company, which supplies drinking water to approximately five million residents, to the Ecuadorian municipality of Pindal, which serves approximately seven thousand consumers but has no existing facilities for microbial water quality testing. In Sri Lanka and Morocco, we are working with local community water supply managers in order to evaluate Aquatest’s use by non-professionals. These community managers operate piped systems serving settlements ranging from approximately 100 to 700 households. Prior to the Aquatest pilot, these community managers had no experience with on-site water quality testing and only infrequently sent samples to external laboratories for analysis.

Aquaya is also piloting the Aquatest system with health agencies who are responsible for monitoring all drinking water sources in their jurisdiction, from urban piped supplies to point sources in rural areas. While most health agencies do have laboratories and trained technicians for analyzing water samples at their provincial offices, they struggle to monitor remote sources due to the logistical challenges of transporting samples back to the central laboratory for analysis. Field staff from these agencies are often based in small towns throughout the province and are responsible for regularly visiting remote communities for a range of activities including health education programs, sanitary inspections, and vaccination campaigns. During the pilot, these field staff are using Aquatest to expand monitoring by reducing their reliance on testing at central laboratories. Surveillance agencies piloting Aquatest include the Chris Hani Municipal Health Services department in South Africa, the Pichincha Provincial Department of Health in Ecuador, the Cochabamba Department of Health in Bolivia and six district health departments in Mozambique.

Rural Health techicians prepare the Aquatest incubator in Tiraque, Bolivia

In addition to these local government actors, Aquaya has partnered with the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) in Nagpur, India, and the Center for Global Safe Water at Emory University. These partnerships with international research institutions provide the opportunity to evaluate Aquatest’s applicability in large scale research projects. Finally, we are also piloting Aquatest with Oxfam in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Somaliland and Bangladesh in order to evaluate Aquatest as a tool for use by International NGOs and their local partners in humanitarian relief and recovery programs.

Aquaya’s field research will help determine Aquatest’s potential for increasing microbial water quality testing in remote settings and will help inform the the optimum strategies for reaching relevant end-users with a commercial product.  In addition, we will analyze the current uses of water quality data in order to identify possible opportunities for increasing the management impact of this data.

Check out more photos of the Aquatest pilot in our photo library.