“Investing in sanitation and hygiene is not only about saving human lives and dignity; it is the foundation for investing in human development, especially in poor urban and peri-urban areas,” explains the foreword to a very useful new publication on sanitation. “However, one of the main bottlenecks encountered the world over, is the limited knowledge and awareness about more appropriate and sustainable systems and technologies that keep project costs affordable and acceptable.”
Until now, such information has been scattered throughout hundreds of books and journals. The “Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies” is a new guidebook produced by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC). It is being launched officially this week at the World Toilet Summit and Expo in Macao.
Bringing together and organizing this information in one document makes it easier for everyone – engineers, planners, development agencies, NGOs and donors –to plan effectively for sanitation solutions. By pulling all the information together in one volume, the Compendium aims to promote a systems approach so that sanitation devices and technologies are considered as parts of an entire system.
Although the book is primarily addressed to engineers and planners dealing with infrastructure delivery, the technology sheets also allow non-experts to understand the main advantages and limitations of different technologies and the appropriateness of different system configurations.
In 2005, Sandec and the WSSCC published Provisional Guidelines for Household-centred Environmental Sanitation (HCES), a new planning approach for implementing the Bellagio Principles on Sustainable Sanitation in Urban Environmental Sanitation. The HCES approach emphasizes the participation of all stakeholders – beginning at the household/neighbourhood – in planning and implementing sanitation systems. “It is our hope that this Compendium will allow all stakeholders to be involved in selecting improved sanitation technologies and to help promote people-centred solutions to real sanitation problems.”
A hard copy of the Compendium can be ordered by writing to info@sandec.ch.
A large scale project to send one million messages a day to South African mobile phones, encouraging South Africans to be tested for HIV/AIDS, will go live December 1, after a pilot project showed that the messages led to a dramatic increase in calls to counselors at the National AIDS helpline in Johannesburg.
The BBC reports that Project Masiluleke will send one million free text messages a day – many in local languages such as Zulu – in what may be the largest ever use of mobile phones for health information purposes. Its developers hope it will encourage hundreds of thousands of people to go for an HIV test in the first year.
The system sends the messages using a “Please Call Me” (PCM) service – a free form of text messaging, found across Africa, that allows someone without any phone credit to send a text to a friend asking them to call. Each sent PCM message has the words “Please Call Me,” the phone number of the caller, and space for an additional 120 characters. The extra space is normally filled with advertising, which helps offset the cost of running the service. About 30m PCM messages are sent every day in South Africa.
The system, which will also eventually be used to provide information about tuberculosis, has been developed and funded by a group of technology firms such as Nokia Siemens Networks, HIV charities, design firms and educational organisations such as National Geographic. It was launched at the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine, BBC says.
