Related articles by Zemanta

• Fighting the Taliban, one text message at a time (textually.org)

Cross post by Alex from over at Tales of Water in Africa:

Over the last year or so, I’ve encountered a tremendous push for innovation in the fields of development and disaster relief. Organizations big and small are looking for the ideas that will catapult millions of people out of poverty. The next clever gadgets that will cheaply and quickly filter water, prevent malaria, and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. These ideas are almost by definition just over the horizon – because once an idea has been around for a few months, it’s not that innovative anymore.

And so what happens to those innovative ideas? What happens when the clever creator has received his fellowship grant and begins to work out the tricky details? From what I’ve seen, the funding organizations have moved on to the next ‘innovation’ and left the creator to work out the Boring Stuff on their own. My experience in Africa has pointed to the Boring Truth – 90% of what’s needed is not innovation but ‘capacity building’ – training, logistics, and equipment purchases. Building systems that can scale up to help thousands more people.

Take for example the work my fiancée does in health care. She is deploying an innovative new computer and mobile phone-based system to track and process health claim forms. It promises to reduce overhead and errors, increasing the rate at which health providers are reimbursed by funding agencies such as KFW (the German development bank). And yet the health providers she partners with, while supportive of her new claims system, are more excited by the equipment and training she is giving as part of the research. They’re excited about the opportunity to purchase laptops, check email, and learn how to track patients on Excel. And they want to do it on laptops, not smart-phones, as are being so heavily touted in development circles. They want to do things like we do in developed countries. Given the option, they’re taking the boring stuff before the innovative.

To a large extent I’ve found the same to be true in the work I do with water. The basic work – building gravity flow systems – has been done since the Romans! It’s not exactly cutting-edge technology. But the great improvements are coming from the Boring Stuff – GPS devices to mark pipe and tank locations. Creating a database to manage the hunt for new sources of water. These behind the scenes changes are making it much easier to build and manage a water system.

But unfortunately the Boring Stuff isn’t sexy enough to get funding. The truth is, nobody wants to fund it because they can’t put their names on it. The funding organizations can’t brag to their peers and donors about the Boring Stuff – “look we gave $10,000 to train X health practitioners on how to enter and process data!” But when they put out $10,000 to fund the Next Big Thing, out come the press, book agents, and dollars.

This trend points to a glaring fact – we in the developed world are more interested in creating a system that makes us feel good rather than creating a system that provides the resources people in the developing world need to succeed. And I will be the first to confess of this – I want to feel good about myself just as much as anyone else.

Now, all this is not to say that innovation is inherently bad – far from it. It is only to say that innovation should not be the absolute focus, or even the primary focus. We need to support the Boring Stuff, the physical and educational infrastructure that will be the foundation on which the vast majority of people are lifted out of poverty.

Related articles by Zemanta

• United Nations population data for every country in the world (guardian.co.uk)
• The Gates Foundation’s Capitalist Manifesto (trueslant.com)
• Gates Foundation Pledges $35 Million for Banking Innovation (innovationtoronto.com)
• A conversation with Bill Gates (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

In a chilling expose today, Toxic Waters – Clean Water Laws are Neglected, at a Cost to Health, Charles DuHigg of the New York Times covers the impunity of polluters and lax regulation of clean water laws. The NYT then goes a step further – creating transparency through a public database of violations which is ‘more comprehensive than the states or the EPA‘, that you can access to find polluters near you on an interactive map. There is also a nice interactive graphic of the Clean Water Act enforcement record in all 50 states. Deep cuts were made in government funding, and now clearly our Environmental Health Monitoring system needs repair. Democracy needs a strong, free media who reports and then acts. Who knew the NYT would be a key environmental health policy innovator overnight?

Read the rest of this entry »

As promised earlier, here is a brief account about the design+water workshop I conducted in Mexico in June.

Two months ago, I was in La Paz, Mexico at NGO Fundación Cántaro Azul, helping them build organizational capacity in human-centered design (HCD).  Cántaro Azul works to improve access to safe water and sanitation for disadvantaged communities, not only in Baja California Sur, but in other parts of Mexico, and abroad. Their interest in HCD is two-fold: to improve existing initiatives and to innovate new approaches.

I recently completed the workshop final report for the organization. In the hopes that the work may be helpful to others, I’m posting the synopsis of the report here, along with some workshop photos. If you’re interested in accessing the report, please contact me directly.

Design thinking workshop final report: Safe water options with rural community stores in BCS 

Fundación Cántaro Azul • La Paz, Baja California Sur, México 

Jaspal S. Sandhu, Ph.D. • July 2009 

This document describes the outcomes of a week-long design thinking workshop held at Fundación Cántaro Azul (FCA) in La Paz in June 2009. The workshop aimed to build design thinking capacity at the organization while working on a problem of actual importance to FCA. The most important practical outcomes of this workshop were two complementary models for providing a clean, affordable drinking water choice for rural people in Baja California Sur via community stores. The primary audience for this document is FCA. It is intended to help them with ongoing activities focused on the community store model and in incorporating this approach in their various activities. The workshop was designed and facilitated by Jaspal Sandhu, the report author. Workshop funding was provided by the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Shown below: Field research during Day 2 and Day 3 of the workshop. (1) Using an auto-servicio system in La Paz (top left); (2) interviewing a user at a rural, government-run purificadora in San Antonio (top right); (3) debriefing after the San Antonio research (bottom left); (4) and obtaining water samples to test from a home in Rosario (bottom right).

I saw this interesting post from Jaspal’s twitter feed (http://twitter.com/jaspaldesign). Speaking of twitter thanks to Alanna for the shout out about our new global health blog (more on that later). Six Revision has a post on 40 useful and creative infographics, of which I pulled out 3 that relate directly to global health: water wars, a history of swine flu, and the global tobaco trade. Related to this I posted a few weeks ago on the use of infographics to tell (or misconvey) a story. Check out the information intense and rich graphics below (I am curious what the intended audience is). On the surface these graphics are cool, but I think they might almost be better off broken up into 3 or 4 pieces. Never-the-less the public health community needs to keep pushing the boundaries of how to tell stories. As a reminder the most popular post on this blog has been about story telling by using animation to incresae awareness about HIV/AIDS.“In this collection, you’ll find forty beautiful and educational infographics, displaying the uncommon spectacle of “art meets science”.

Glass Half Empty: The Coming Water Wars
An infographic on the global water shortage crisis.

Trouble
This infographic showcases the history of the Swine Flu, starting from 1976.

SSSMOKIN! The Global Tobacco Trade
A packed visual piece on tobacco chemicals and tobacco trade worldwide.

–

It’s been more than two years since we reported on Seattle as the new Geneva, that is, as the new epicenter of global health activity. An article in this morning Journal-Sentinel (Water-engineering firms see potential, challenge in developing countries) – which includes an exclusive interview with the Acumen Fund’s chief executive Jacqueline Novogratz – suggests that Milwaukee is angling to do the same for water technology:

It’s an issue that almost certainly will preoccupy business leaders in metro Milwaukee in their strategy to brand the region as an international hub of water technology. The metro area is home to scores of water-engineering companies. Gov. Jim Doyle and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee this month announced plans to invest millions of dollars for UWM to become a center of freshwater research.

An 2008 article from the same newspaper (Area’s tide could turn on water technology) provides more evidence:

[F]our of the world’s 11 largest water-technology companies have a significant presence in southeastern Wisconsin, according to an analysis of data from a new Goldman Sachs report.

…

Wall Street has tracked automakers, railroads and retailers almost since there were stocks and bonds. But water remains a novelty. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. didn’t begin to research water treatment as a stand-alone industrial sector until late 2005.

While several large MNCs have shown an active interest in clean water in developing countries (e.g., Procter and Gamble, Vestergaard Frandsen, Dow) open questions remain as to what role large MNCs will play in providing access to safe water for the one billion people who don’t have it.

(Thanks to Dr. Jessica Granderson for sending the link)

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to view a PhotoVoice exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley organized by Haath Mein Sehat (HMS), a group working to improve access to clean water and sanitation in six slums of Hubballi and Mumbai, including Dharavi.

It was exciting to see a group effectively blend the advocacy elements of PhotoVoice with the design elements of cultural probes. The difference between the two approaches is less in the methods and more in the use of the outputs. In this case, they organized the exhibition to raise awareness and break down stereotypes of slum life, and they are using the photographic corpus to guide the design of both programs and technologies related to their core mission.

What I was most interested in from a design perspective were the instructions given to community photographers and how this tied back to the mission of HMS. The results below followed from the simple prompt: “Represent your daily experience with water”.

We are generally focused on solutions and here, but I couldn’t help but post this news story on pharmaceutical “waste” being dumped into the water supply in India and what the subsequent impact might be (drug resistance, unknown clinical damage to those who consume the water, environmental destruction):

World’s highest drug levels entering India stream
AP News, Jan 25 (see full story here or here)

PATANCHERU, India –When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000.

And it wasn’t just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments.

Those Indian factories produce drugs for much of the world, including many Americans. The result: Some of India’s poor are unwittingly consuming an array of chemicals that may be harmful, and could lead to the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria.

In India, villagers near this treatment plant have a long history of fighting pollution from various industries and allege their air, water and crops have been poisoned for decades by factories making everything from tires to paints and textiles. Some lakes brim with filmy, acrid water that burns the nostrils when inhaled and causes the eyes to tear… “I’m frustrated. We have told them so many times about this problem, but nobody does anything,” said Syed Bashir Ahmed, 80, casting a makeshift fishing pole while crouched in tall grass along the river bank near the bulk drug factories. “The poor are helpless. What can we do?”

I was recently contacted by a non-profit organization based in Washington D.C called International Action (IA) to help them raise awareness about the problems they are tackling in Haiti. IA installs water treatment systems in Port-au-Prince, Haiti using chlorinators. Chlorniators, according to IA, are very cheap, simple, easy to install and maintain. It would be interesting to see how this method stacks up against other water sanitation efforts in terms of costs & financing, logistics, sustainability, adoption/use and impact.

Haiti Innovation recently profiled IA: “At the end of five years, IA aims to have installed 500 chlorinators covering most of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, giving clean water for the first time to 2.5 million people.” You can view some of the locations IA is working in with their nifty Google maps mashup:

Below is a guest post from Amelie over at IA:

Guest Post by International Action

Among 147 countries Haiti scores last on the water poverty index scale according to the World Water Council (WWC). This means that Haiti is the country with the worst access to clean water in the world.

In fact, most water sources in Haiti are contaminated with human waste and disease. The result is a tragedy. Haiti has the highest infant mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere and this is due to preventable waterborne diseases such as chronic diarrhea, typhoid and hepatitis.

International Action, a Washington D.C based non-profit installs water treatment systems called chlorinators on top of local public water tanks. They now protect more than 450,000 Haitians with clean, safe drinking water in 23 of the poorest neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince.

International Action’s special tablet chlorinators are easy to install, use and maintain, they do not require electricity and therefore they are ideal for the developing world. The system is simple: 10% of the water runs through the device, dilutes the chlorine tablets and mixes it with the rest of the water in the tank. The chlorine levels are safe, pre-set and regularly tested. A chlorinator can provide clean water for up to 10,000 people for the smaller model LF1500 and 50,000 for the larger one LF2000.

The biggest installation in Jalousie supplies a community of 50,000. The local hospital has instantly noticed a reduction in the cases of waterborne diseases which they must treat. Analyses of the water have shown that germs of typhoid, cholera and hepatitis are no longer present in Jalousie’s water; waterborne diseases have virtually disappeared in the communities which have the chlorinators installed.

During the month of December, International Action has installed 6 new chlorinators in the neighborhood of Delmas 30. The population is thrilled because although they receive water from CAMEP — Independent Metropolitan Water Company — four days a week, they do not drink it because it is contaminated. In early December, CAMEP called International Action for help. 50,000 more Haitians are now protected with clean, safe drinking water provided by International Action.

For more information visit our website at www.haitiwater.org

Friday ended with an impressive lineup of global health leaders discussing the disconnect between horizontal and vertical funding in the plenary session titled Meeting Along the Diagonal: Where the First and Last Mile Connect.  A webcast of this session, and 2-3 others from the Global Health Council Conference, will be available on kaisernetwork.org starting Tues-3-Jun-2008.  It’s nearly 2 hours long, but brings together ideas from the Gates Foundation, WHO, the Global Health Council, and USAID.  As much as it was about these organizations and the types of organizations (foundation, multilateral, advocacy, bilateral), it was about the individuals who spoke their minds:

• Jaime Sepulveda, Director, Integrated Health Solutions Development, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization
• Nils Daulaire, President and CEO, Global Health Council
• Henrietta H. Fore, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development, Director, U.S. United States Foreign Assistance