The Portuguese Water Partnership (PWP) has continued to promote the international platform “Building Bridges and Partnerships across Portuguese-Speaking Countries” (P3LP, its Portuguese acronym).

The scope of this lusophone institutional and business platform covers five African Portuguese-speaking countries, including Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé e Principe. The P3LP platform focuses on sharing experiences and knowledge on water issues between public and private entities. This sharing promotes partnerships between government agencies, water utilities and enterprises under the framework of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Technical Visits to Portugal

An example of a core initiative undertaken since the project’s start in 2016 is technical visits to Portugal. Delegations of key decision makers and water sector managers from these five African countries are able to visit different locations in Portugal. Typically lasting one week, these initiatives have multiple opportunities to meet and interact directly with representatives from the Portuguese government, private sector and research institutions.  These interactions stimulate future institutional, commercial and technical partnerships.

So far, the feedback from the invited delegates from Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, Cabo Verde and Angola have been overwhelmingly positive. Feedback has also been positive from the Portuguese participants in multiple initiatives such as public seminars, thematic workshops, business round tables, technical visits and institutional contacts.

Other Activities

Throughout the project, the multiple seminars and public sessions that have been organized have engaged several hundred participants. This engagement has broadly disseminated project outputs and the reinforced networking links within the Portuguese-speaking water sector professional community. Some of the specialized studies undertaken by the project include a detailed examination of European Development Fund opportunities in the African water sector (EuropeAid), and a detailed diagnosis of capacitation gaps and investment priorities in several water utilities operating in these countries.

According to Ms. Alexandra Serra, President of the Portuguese Water Partnership, “P3LP is an initiative that will equally strengthen the internationalization of the Portuguese water sector by developing mechanisms to facilitate the business matching between these countries and the Portuguese professional water community.” Following the latest technical mission to Portugal by a delegation from Angola in June 2017, the next steps on P3LP’s roadmap include the Lusophone Water Resource Symposium in Oporto in September 2017 and a similar visit by a Mozambican delegation in November 2017.

Approximately 95 percent of residents in Silula Village, in western Kenya, obtain their drinking water from springs and rivers. Yet the majority of these sources are unprotected from pollution. Water typically flows from the spring eye to be collected meters away. This route exposes it to fecal contamination, domestic activities such as washing of clothes and utensils, and agricultural runoff.

In November 2016, community members took part in a USAID-supported initiative to promote conservation of key water sources in Siaya County by protecting and strengthening of Water Resources User Associations (WRUAs). WRUAs are voluntary membership associations made up of water users and riparian owners interested in proper management of their water resources.

Enthusiastic community members contributed fencing posts, bricks and hardcore to secure the spring intake and unskilled labor to clear and improve the access path to the spring. The benefits of protecting and conserving the spring were experienced immediately. The bacteriological quality was improved by the physical barriers of the spring catchment, which target water directly to the spring eye. The physical quality, including turbidity, is also controlled in the same way because no sediments can escape the outlet pipe. The flow rate was increased due to a build-up in water pressure behind the spring catchment wall.

Naima and her young daughter get drinking water from the protected spring in Silula Village, Siaya
Source: Eric Onyiego/KIWASH

“Long queues at the spring are unheard of now. My 20 liter jerry cans fill up within just two minutes!  Moreover, my family of four now uses five jerry cans per day up from the two we used to queue for so long to fill up,”  Naima Mohammed, 23, says. Much has changed since her original trips of over 90 minutes every other day to collect water even though the spring was only 300 meters from her home.

These changes improved the quality and quantity of water available to over 700 community members. The protection of the Silula Spring also encouraged community members to register as voluntary members of the WRUA. As a part of this membership they made commitments to carry out a wide range of activities contributing towards better watershed management. For example, avoiding activities on demarcated riparian areas, carrying out soil and water conservation activities, planting trees, and controlling water pollution.

KIWASH Project

The 2015-2020 USAID Kenya Integrated Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (KIWASH) Project works with local communities, county water offices and decision-makers. The project aims to improve community representation in WRUAs within sub-catchments to increase sensitization on integrated watershed conservation and water resources management. The project also aims to build the capacity of county governments and institutions to expand source water protection and improve water access. 

Realizing the need to address poor sanitation access and improve the entire fecal sludge management (FSM) value chain in Dakar, the National Sanitation Office of Senegal (ONAS) partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create the Program for the Structuring of the Fecal Sludge Market (PSFSM). This program has two primary aims: provide high-quality, inexpensive mechanical emptying services to consumers while also increasing the incomes of professional emptiers.

Like many major African metropolises, Senegal’s capital city of Dakar faces enormous sanitation challenges. These challenges are largely concentrated in the low-income suburban areas of Pikine and Guédiawaye. Of the almost 1.5 million people living in these areas, about 96 percent use on-site sanitation, consisting of pit latrines at individual households. Because of the shallow water table, pits must be frequently emptied—usually twice a year. However, residents are often unable to access emptying trucks when they need them. Additionally due to weak competition, the cost of emptying is beyond the reach of the majority of the population, who live on less than $2 per day. Therefore, about 44 percent of households resort to manual emptying, which negatively impacts public health and the environment.

The steps that customers must take to have their latrine or septic tank emptied through ONAS.

Program Innovations

A key aspect of PSFSM is the call center, which serves as a direct link between customers and emptiers. When the customer calls the center and requests emptying at a particular place, date and time, emptiers then submit quotes via SMS. Once the bidding process is over, the lowest bidder and the customer are notified and the service is confirmed. This cutting-edge program allows for easy access to pit emptying and low prices for customers, increased opportunity for emptiers to expand their business, and quality control and monitoring conducted by the call center.

A guarantee fund promotes the development of the fecal sludge emptying industry by enabling companies to improve their equipment and obtain proper licenses and certifications. PSFSM also helps customers save and pay for emptying services by making mobile money services more readily available.

Handing over responsibility of fecal sludge treatment plants (FSTPs) to the private sector has also been essential to PSFSM success. Previously when plants were managed by the government, they were in a state of advanced deterioration, and were not profitable or efficient. With this unique public-private partnership, facilities have been renovated, maintenance and operations improved, administrative organization increased, marketing of dried sludge byproducts advanced, and profitability increased.

Sharing Best Practices

In just three and half years of operation, PSFSM has seen significant success in the areas of efficiency, profitability and stakeholder satisfaction. Want to learn more about the lessons learned from PSFSM? Click here to see their lessons learned report.

ONAS is also a mentor in the RASOP Program because of their development of industry best practices. RASOP, implemented by the African Water Association, focuses on reinforcing the capacities of African sanitation operators on non-sewer sanitation and fecal sludge management through peer-to-peer learning partnerships.

Originally written by Fara Ndiaye on Speak Up Africa

In the northwest Indian village of Ajrakhpur, 37-year-old Sufiyan ­Khatri stirs several stinky vats: one of bubbling indigo, another simmering pomegranate skins and a third containing a black, gummy brew of rusty bicycle parts fermenting with sugar cane. The mixtures are used to dye textiles with a traditional block-print method called ajrakh. He is one of more than 50 artisans in the village producing the textiles as a main source of income.

Sufiyan Khatri learned to make the textile dyes from his grandfather, but he likes to experiment with color and design.

And he’s been pleased to have welcomed some new assistants: earthworms. Their job is to deal with toxic materials in the dyes that are not only bad for the environment but also make it impossible to reuse the wastewater for the next round of dyeing. Thousands of the wiggly creatures live inside a water filter — called a « vermifilter. » That’s the term for a treatment system that cleans dye-tainted water. It was installed last May with support from the nongovernmental organization KHAMIR — Kutch Heritage, Art, Music, Information and Resources. The group connects the artisans of the Kutch district with outside resources and markets.

The filter is a few feet from Khatri’s studio. It is constructed out of dozens of bright blue plastic crates packed with organic materials including cotton roots, dirt and all of those earthworms. Sprinklers spray murky blue water from attached tanks into the crates. The water trickles through the dirt. Worms then feed on toxic dyes in the wastewater and excrete « wormcasts » that are not toxic. The water is filtered through the worm poop, the cotton roots and other materials and comes out a pale yellow — and clean enough to reuse in the textile process.

The ability to reuse water is critical for the village, which consumes over 52,000 gallons of water every day to maintain an annual output of over almost 460,000 square feet of hand-printed cloth. Each piece is washed at least three times in community water tanks. And the artisans say they create colors by « playing with water » — adding varying amounts of ingredients like pomegranate skins and then bringing the mixture to a boil.

Hundreds of years ago, Ajrakh artisans had plenty of water to play with. But groundwater in northwest India is increasingly depleted  due to overuse, Ajrakhpur’s artisans are concerned about the future of their craft. « If we don’t get water, » Khatri says, « We stop our work. »

Wasseem Abbas dips cloth printed with mud in fermented indigo. After it dries, the cloth will be washed several times and if the water used has a high iron content, dark spots will appear on the fabric.

Signs that something is amiss are already visible on Khatri’s textiles. As water levels decrease, minerals in it like iron become more concentrated, which can leave dark spots on prints after the artisans wash them. And there are more serious problems: the release of dyes into the environment is a main source of water pollution. Khatri prides himself on using natural dyes, but many artisans use water tainted by synthetic dyes — and dispose of it in open drains.

Khatri says artisans appreciate that the worms have already cut their water costs. But the output of the filter — about 13,500 gallons per day— is far from what they need to meet a growing demand for their textiles. The Indian government has approved a grant funded by India’s Ministry of Textiles to build a vermifilter in Ajrakhpur three times the size of the current one. It will be completed in the next two years.

Vermifiltration technology was first made available in Chile in the 1990s. The largest systems are in South America, where they are predominantly used for treating industrial wastewater, according to Kevin Jeffery, managing director of Wastewater Wizard Limited. He calls vermifiltration « a revolutionary approach to wastewater treatment. »

However, there are limitations, says professor Ralf Otterpohl, director of the Institute of Wastewater Management and Water Protection at Hamburg University of Technology. One of the biggest challenges is that the worms need warm soil temperatures to thrive. Plus, he adds, this type of technology is most suitable for small-scale production.

That still leaves plenty of opportunity for Transchem Agritech, the enterprising Indian company that installed the vermifilter in Ajrakhpur. The company has vermifilters across India’s dairy, sugar and chemical industries. The one in Ajrakhpur is the first in the handicraft industry, so developing the right environment for the worms — with the right mix of materials so they could help minimize the dyes in the water — required some tinkering.

As Khatri says: « We have to be creative to continue. »

Originally published on May 20, 2017 by NPR (National Public Radio) 

Originally written by Shaina Shealy, find her on Twitter @shainashealy