WASHTech Uganda Staff will participate in the writeshop to develop an introductory summary to TAF.  The summary will help stakeholders comprehend TAF in five minutes. The two page summary will be developed during the 3 day workshop among other products.

The Uganda WASH write shop is meant to help each participant to create sharable outputs. The write shop will provide the space and time to focus. Time will be allotted each day to peer-review and proof read each other’s work.

Some of the finished products will be published on Uganda WASH Resource Centre website during the workshop and after.

However the technology thematic working group is underutilized. In 2011, the working group implemented a few of activities including exposure visits to a sodis water treatment plants, participated in  the FLOW software capacity building training and presented their experiences during the CSO Forum 2011.

WASHTech seeks to revamp the group and build on its existing works and plans of the working group to facilitate learning, profiling NGO WASH technology activities.

NETWAS Uganda the chair of the working group will organize a planning meeting in early to forecast the future of the working group, especially on what to do differently and better.

Output 6 of the National Self Supply Acceleration Framework indentifies the need for research to access the potential, applicability and sustainability of self supply technologies. The TAF assessment results on the rope pump and Tippy tap will generate evidence that will attempt to provide answers on the sustainability of these in different specific contexts.   

The National Framework on Accelerating self supply in Uganda is a guiding tool that paves a road map to implement Self Supply interventions in the sector by stipulating out principles, guidelines, roles & responsibilities for each stakeholder and specific outputs that will elevate the stake of the Self Supply come 2015.

In Uganda, WASHTech anticipates to embed TAF into the sector for uptake and scale up through existing learning platforms, the Self Supply steering committee being one of them. Other learning platforms identified are the Sector and sub sector working groups, like the UWASNET Technology working group, Functionality working group, National sanitation working group.

In the second year of implementation, WASHTech will pilot and test TAF. This will be done through a comprehensive research methodology with the aim of evaluating the suitability; usefulness of TAF and for the intended users and purpose.

In her presentation, Mrs. Nimanya elaborated on the WASHTech project and its action research. She clearly emphasized that the TAF is a decision support tool that will enable stakeholders to develop a consolidated picture of the applicability and sustainability of the introduction of a WASH technology into a specific context.

The presentation of the TAF raised mixed feelings and anxiety among the participants. Some felt TAF will bridge a gap in the technology introductory process. Some participants expressed that would like to part of the testing of TAF to have a more practical experience.  Information materials including the Country leaflet were shared with the participants.

In the learning alliance approach of the project, WASHTech in Uganda utilizes such existing government initiated information sharing platforms to embed the introduction of TAF into the WASH sector. In the hope that they will adopt, use and scale up its application in they work.

The inter-district platforms are learning and sharing meeting organized by the Technical support units for both the district technical and political wings.  Technical support units are parallel government structures that government has created to co-ordinate, monitor, and quality assure the delivery of government programs in Water and sanitation.

For each technology there is a description of the range of literature available on it, a concise description of the technology itself, a description of its application, a selection of interesting case studies, and an explanation as to whether the technology meets technical, financial, social and institutional success criteria.

Only two technologies met all four success criteria: hand dug wells and the India Mark II pump, and the latter only with the caveat that there was a functional maintenance system.

The least successful technology was the Playpump, which was only institutionally successful, and even that was only after significant pressure was put on governments by non-conventional donors. Jerry cans and the gulper only met one success criteria (technical success); they may meet other success criteria but further research is required. Most technologies were technically successful – the only failures were bio-additives and Playpumps. The other success criteria were met by roughly half of the technologies.

Core issues that WASHTech plans to take up further include the appeal of inappropriate technologies like Playpumps and Lifestraws to naive donors, and ways to get government approval for low-cost, locally managed technologies.

Full reference:

Parker, A. et al., 2011. Africa wide water, sanitation and hygiene technology review. (WASHTech Deliverable 2.1). The Hague: WASHTech c/o IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and Cranfield: Cranfield University. 93 p. : 1 box, 9 fig., 1 tab. Includes references.
Available at: http://wp.me/a1szDW-1o

On page 163 of the SPR, table 11.7, it is indicated that NETWAS, through the WASHTech project, is supporting the development of a technology assessment framework for appropriate technologies including domestic rain water harvesting, the rope pump and the Canzee pump.

The participation of NETWAS in the Self Supply Steering Committee of organisations that are promoting the concept in Uganda contributed to the inclusion of this highlight in the SPR.

Opportunities and Challenges

As the WASH sector anticipates adopting and using the TAF, the Sector Performance Report 2011 represents an opportunity to stimulate discussions in the sector on the rationale, use and need for a TAF through targeted advocacy.

At the steering wheel:

In Uganda, the Network for Water and Sanitation Uganda (NETWAS) and WaterAid in Uganda are steering the implementation of WASHTech. NETWAS manages the day to day implementation of the project to ensure embedding of the TAF into the sector, while Water Aid in Uganda is responsible for the action research associated with piloting and testing of the Technology Assessment Framework (TAF).

WASHTech adopted the learning alliance approach to facilitate learning around the development, testing, piloting and scaling up of a Technology Assessment Framework. The learning alliance is structured around existing learning platforms in the sector, from national learning forums to regional & district learning platforms. Lessons and issues coming from these platforms will feed into various existing working groups and vice-versa.

A core team of 12 members provides technical and strategic support to the implementation of the project. These members, who come from line ministries, NGOs and the private sector, were drawn from the various relevant sector and sub-sector working groups mentioned above.,

Conceptual framework of the learning alliance.

These are some of the questions that WASHTech consortium members are pondering in this extra Consortium meeting hosted in Burkina Faso. During two days (4 and 5 October), the three WASHTech country teams and work package coordinators are reviewing progress with the TAF, the technology scoping and selection studies, the piloting of the TAF, internal and external communication, the embedding and learning alliance process, impact assessment and process monitoring on the basis of the KAP survey.

Consortium participants taking part to the Ouagadougou meeting

This rich programme will be followed by a two-day training workshop (6 & 7 October) where the same participants will be reflecting together about the picture of change (1) that they have developed for the project as a whole and that they should develop for each project country. In the second day of the workshop, the participants will be trained on the monitoring approach The Most Significant Change.

All presentations and discussions around this workshop will be documented and some of them summarised on this website.

Notes:

(1)    The picture of change has been adapted from the theory of change – for which you can read a definition in this useful glossary.

The CLARA and Water BioTech projects, like WASHTech, are supported by a European Commission (EC) fund for environmental research in Africa. The EC actively stimulates collaboration between the projects that they fund. One of the instruments that the EC provides to support this is CAAST-Net, the Network for the Coordination and Advancement of Sub-Saharan Africa-EU Science and Technology Cooperation.

The EC and CAAST-Net organised a meeting of coordinators of environmental projects funded by the EC Coordinated Call for Africa on 20 September 2011 in Brussels. Participants explored possibilities for cooperation, for instance by clustering related projects. One natural cluster that emerged was that between CLARA, Water BioTech and WASHTech.

CLARA’s coordinator Dr. Günter Langergraber had participated in the WASHTech kick-off meeting in The Hague in February 2011. His organisation, the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences based in Vienna, Austria, is also one of the consortium partners in Water BioTech. CREPA from  Burkina Faso is a partner in all three projects.

CLARA, Water BioTech and WASHTech could increase their outreach and make it more effective through joint presentations and dissemination activities, and by working together on a common communication strategy. EC representative Panagiotis Balabanis encouraged the three projects to draft a collaboration outline.

A potential first opportunity for the three projects to jointly present themselves is in November 2011 at the Second CAAST-Net Stakeholder Conference on Africa-Europe S&T Cooperation. This high-level meeting offers not only a strategic opportunity for joint promotion of the three projects but also for WASH innovation in Africa in general.

For more information on the other projects see:

• CLARA – Capacity-Linked water and sanitation for Africa’s peri-urban and Rural Areas, http://clara.boku.ac.at/
• Water BioTech – Biotechnology for Africa’s sustainable water supply – http://bit.ly/qoUMBp

In most countries there is no formal system for technology assessment. As a result, various African governments have delayed the decision as to whether or not rope pumps can be considered an acceptable level of supply for households and communities. The Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Technologies (WASHTech) research project aims to bring innovative technologies to help Africa meet the Millennium Development Goals.

The WASHTech project (2011-2013) is involving local partners in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Uganda to introduce a robust Technology Assessment Framework (TAF) that will assess the potential of new innovative technologies which may be used at decentralised level. The TAF will examine key criteria such as: how the technology performs, whether buyers and users are interested in the technology (i.e. the market), whether the technology can be applied widely, what support is required from government and private sector institutions how sustainable the technology is over time.

Direct research outputs will be: a) a widely applicable Technology Assessment Framework (TAF) and process that will provide a simple system and criteria for evaluating new technologies and their performance, identifying sustainability issues, and analysing approaches to introduction, innovation, diffusion and scaling up and b) well established capacities in three countries to apply the TAF and adapt processes to local contexts.

The research will also seek to define strategies for innovation and scaling up, and the time-span and process needed to achieve successful up-take of innovations. These outputs will be of direct use to the sector and an indication of the value and application of the framework.

The partners involved in WASHTech are:

• Centre Régional pour l’Eau Potable et l’Assainissement à faible coût (CREPA) in Burkina Faso
• Network for Water and Sanitation (NETWAS), Uganda
• Training, Research and Networking for Development (TREND), Ghana
• Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana
• WaterAid in Ghana, Uganda and Burkina Faso.

European partners include IRC in The Netherlands (coordinating the project), SKAT Foundation in Switzerland, Cranfield University and WaterAid in the United Kingdom.

The WASHTech project is co-funded under the 7^th Framework Programme of the European Commission’s Africa research programme

For more information about WASHTech please contact Jo Smet (smet@irc.nl).