Development of program implementation, evaluation, and selection tools for household water treatment and safe storage systems in developing countries

Abstract

Over the past six years, the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering's Master of Engineering program has undertaken various projects involved with the design and implementation of a wide range of household drinking water treatment and safe storage (HWTS) systems. Projects have been conducted in Nepal, Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Peru, with the current year's project team focused on Kenya. These individual and team projects have brought the overall HWTS program to a point where program implementation practices are now of great interest. The primary objective of this thesis is to generate program implementation and selection tools to aid in the implementation of HWTS systems for local communities in developing nations. The tools generated are presented as two separate components: (1) a HWTS implementation organization survey and (2) a HWTS technology selection tool. The HWTS implementation organization survey is intended primarily for information collection on currently implemented HWTS programs, but is also applicable for pre-implementation scenarios. In late 2004, in collaboration with the Implementation Working Group of the WHO International Network to Promote Household Drinking Water and Safe Storage ("The Network"), the MIT team developed a draft implementation organization survey.

(cont.) During January 2005, this survey instrument was vetted and iterated through interactions with eleven different HWTS implementing program groups working in five of Kenya's seven provinces and one area, who are applying eight different HWTS technologies: household chlorination, solar disinfection, boiling, ceramic candle filtration, concrete BioSand filtration, combined flocculation/ disinfection, defluoridation with bone char, and the modified clay pot. The HWTS technology selection tool is meant to aid stakeholders in the choice of the most appropriate HWTS technology, or combination of technologies, for a given potential implementation area. The tool utilizes parameters such as target population and water source to generate a score specific to each of the HWTS technologies and to effectively rank each of the technologies in terms of applicability to a given target area. Research collected by the MIT team during the January 2005 Kenya trip served as the primary basis for the allocation of scores for each of the parameters utilized.