The initiative has already set up five operational ‘Rain Schools’ in the Mekong River region, aided by financial support from the Mekong-Korea Cooperation Fund (MKCF) and supported by the Mekong Institute (MI), creating a number of educational hubs to provide water management training and resources.
The Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MoEYS) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Royal Academy of Cambodia (RAC), in collaboration with South Korea and Seoul National University (SNU).

Rain Schools focus on the construction of rainwater storage facilities and filtration systems in schools, enabling student access to clean water and promoting student education in effective rainwater management.

The first Rain School to be established in Southeast Asia was located at the Nguyen Binh Khiem School in Ha Long City, Vietnam, in 2022. The rainwater collection system installed there consists of a single storage tank incorporating a special film that treats the water as it flows down from the roof. The system also incorporates multiple treatment stages that avoids the failure of the whole system if failure of one stage should occur. There are now Rain Schools operating in Cambodia, South Korea and Vietnam.

The Cambodian Rain School Initiative also aims to establish community-based rainwater harvesting systems, sharing relevant knowledge with Korea by establishing a water management network with SNU.
MoEYS, RAC and SNU are seeking support from the United Nations (UN) with the aim of extending the initiative across 1,000 primary schools across Cambodia. This will be a careful step-by-step process, implemented in phases with MoEYS prioritising public primary schools as these schools are particularly vulnerable to drought. Cambodia is also discussing potential partnerships with international organisations such as the UN, WHO and UNICEF, focused on training.

The innovative Rainwater for Drinking (RFD) systems installed at Rain Schools are based on a deep understanding of the value of rainwater, reflecting local and historical cultural traditions. Each RFD provides 500 litres of safe drinking water per day, providing enough purified drinking water to meet demand at schools all year round.

The initiative is endorsed by the UN Water Action Agenda, promoting awareness and collaboration across the region by engaging students in addressing global water challenges through educational activities. The initiative also aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly the water-related targets of UN SDG 6.1.

Global Rain School activities were the subject of a presentation delivered to a side event at the UN Water Conference, attended by students from a number of countries and bringing together stakeholders to discuss the pivotal role of rainwater management and explore potential strategies for future broader implementation. An article in The Source helped to introduce the schools to water professionals resulting in a Rain School Camp taking place in South Korea.

The post Rain Schools progress in Cambodia appeared first on The Source.

For her keynote presentation at the IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition in Toronto, Canada, in August, Professor Amy Pruden, of Virginia Tech, USA, chose a title of ‘The Water Sector and the Slow Pandemic of Antimicrobial Resistance’. It is a title capturing an issue that stems from a natural ability of microbes that brings with it dire warnings.

Pruden sums up antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, as “the ability of microbes to survive antimicrobial treatments”. So, this includes resistance to antibiotics – “one very precious class of antimicrobials that treat bacterial infections”.

“How do they do this? Simply put, it’s in their DNA – their antibiotic resistance genes, or ARGs. These encode the ability of bacteria to do things like pump the antibiotic out of the cell, to break the antibiotic down, or to modify the cell target so that the antibiotic is no longer effective,” explains Pruden.

“Microbes are a lot smarter than we often give them credit for,” she continues. “They are very adept at evolution on very rapid time scales. They can also do something that we humans can’t do – they can physically share their DNA through horizontal gene transfer.” This latter point is relevant for water treatment – killing microbes may not be enough. “We also have to think about their DNA.”

A global health concern

Then come the warnings. One hundred years ago, a simple cut or bout of pneumonia was deadly, and this is not a place to which we would wish to return, comments Pruden. Noting a report in The Lancet and the 2016 UK ‘O’Neill Report’, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department of Health, she says: “They issue a dire warning that the slow pandemic of AMR is here. And if we don’t coordinate globally to do something about it, deaths due to AMR will surpass those due to cancer.

“On a hopeful note, there is global action taking root,” Pruden continues. One key example here is the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance, with WHO advocating for a ‘One Health’ approach. This requires all Member States to develop a national action plan for combating antimicrobial resistance. “To date, 164 of these national action plans have been published,” says Pruden.

Other examples she gives include the G7 Health Ministries. “When they met in 2022, they identified three top global public health threats: the COVID-19 pandemic, the slow pandemic of AMR, and climate change,” notes Pruden. The response, supported as part of the G7 Pact for Pandemic Readiness, included “development of integrated, interoperable and interdisciplinary surveillance”, including antimicrobial resistance. Here, Pruden points out: “They specifically call out non-invasive national wastewater surveillance systems.”

The water sector contribution

The global ‘One Health’ response to AMR requires action on multiple fronts and, on this note, Pruden highlights the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report ‘Bracing for superbugs’. This covers the state of the science, the role of antimicrobial resistance in the environment, and what can be done about it. “I’m proud to be one of the co-authors of this report,” says Pruden.

“One of the take-home consensus messages was that AMR challenges cannot be understood or addressed separately from the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity, and pollution and waste.

“The report elaborates on the role of antimicrobial resistance in the environment, particularly the water environment. So, water environments are key recipients, conduits and sources of exposure for AMR,” she adds, noting prime examples given as agricultural runoff, industrial inputs, and wastewater inputs.

“It also highlights how, if we are going to use this ‘One Health’ framework – people, animals, environment – that has been adopted by the World Health Organization, we need to get a handle on the understanding of the environmental dimensions of AMR.”

Here, Pruden highlights the relevance of wastewater. For a start, pharmaceuticals are not broken down fully in the body, so pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics are excreted into sewage. Wastewater also contains antibiotic resistant pathogens, antibiotic resistant genes (ARGs), and mobile genetic elements (MGEs) – “pieces of DNA that help ARGs move across bacterial populations”. Meanwhile, treatment processes such as activated sludge – perfected over the past 100 years – select for a particular microbial ecology. “We are concerned that this could be inadvertently creating an environment that’s ideal for selecting for antibiotic resistance, so some refer to this as a possible hot spot for the evolution of AMR.” This is a point Pruden returns to later.

Pruden highlights that the UNEP report also provides a framework for taking action around the environment and AMR, especially around the sectors that produce and use antimicrobials and the wastes they produce. “We need to think about their waste management in terms of AMR. So, do we need to focus on source control? Do we need to focus on requiring that there be pretreatment before discharge to the sewage works?” asks Pruden.

The need for monitoring

“One of the things that the water sector can do right now is help support monitoring of AMR. There are a lot of knowledge gaps in terms of the rates of resistance and where it’s coming from,” she says.

This need was noted in the 2019 launch of the Water Research Foundation (WRF) ‘Project 5052’, the findings of which were summarised in a 2022 Environmental Science & Technology paper, covering research in Switzerland, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Sweden, and the USA.

“We spent a good portion of the pandemic wrapping our heads around what we need to do in terms of AMR monitoring in water environments,” says Pruden. “A key takeaway is that where to monitor and what to monitor really depends on the objective of your monitoring programme.”

She points to four aspects around monitoring: monitoring antimicrobial resistant bacteria and genes circulating in human populations; quantifying what is evading treatment; quantifying removal efficiencies; and assessing evolution of new resistance pathogens and mobile ARGs.

“The first one is wastewater-based epidemiology – testing the sewage itself to get a sense of the carriage of AMR organisms in the population served. The second is to look at the effluents coming out of these plants and to see if there are any AMR constituents of clinical concern. The third is to look at the treatment processes, quantify removal rates and identify which are the most effective at attenuating AMR. Finally, the fourth is the issue of hot spots: are there places in the environment where there’s a convergence of factors, where there’s an elevated probability of resistant pathogens evolving?”

Techniques for testing

In terms of testing techniques, Pruden says: “AMR is tricky… It is a multi-headed beast. So, there’s really hundreds of strains of bacteria that can be resistant, and thousands of ARGs, so we concluded that really all the methods have value. Again, it depends on what your objectives are.”

She notes that use of cultures is always going to be of value: “It’s the one method that can confirm a viable organism.” Here, she refers to WHO’s Tricycle Protocol. Non-culture-based techniques include those built around polymerase chain reaction (PCR). “Then, most recently, a real game changer has been DNA sequencing… We can use non-targeted DNA sequencing to profile everything that’s in there and just compare with databases to see what we’re interested in.”

“Recently,  we were able to demonstrate the potential of this metagenomic DNA sequencing approach. We sent students around the world and sampled sewage from representative wastewater treatment plants. It was really remarkable how we could distinguish these sewages based on their ARG content,” says Pruden.

“What we saw was that the wastewater from Sweden had the lowest abundances of ARGs of anywhere that we tested. This makes sense because they’ve been one of the most proactive countries in terms of adopting policy to combat the spread of AMR, including banning antibiotic use in livestock since the late 1990s.

“We also saw that the highest levels of ARGs in sewage were in parts of the world that have very high population densities and that don’t require a prescription from a doctor to use antibiotics,” she adds.

“There’s a lot of potential here, not only to fill the gap in terms of clinical testing and understanding the rates of antibiotic resistance carried in human populations, but also to inform effective global policy – what works in terms of stemming the spread of antimicrobial resistance.”

Here, Pruden returns to the question of whether wastewater treatment plants are hot spots for AMR. “We went to those same wastewater treatment plants, and we sequenced the metagenomes of the activated sludge. The ARGs were sharply depleted in the activated sludge. This is quite encouraging, that wastewater treatment plants can be a barrier to the proliferation of ARGs.”

This was explored further using long-read DNA sequencing. “We concluded that the microbial ecology of activated sludge is a natural barrier to the proliferation of ARGs.”

“That’s not the full story,” adds Pruden, who says that current work is looking at which ARGs escape treatment and which are transferred horizontally. Bench-scale testing involved using blends of municipal sewage and hospital sewage, and it was possible to track increases in ARGs that related to the same classes of antibiotics increasing in the sewage. This work was published recently in Nature Communications.

The benefits of monitoring

There is a wider dimension to this wastewater monitoring. “We talk about the need for a One Health framework to combat the spread of AMR globally, but the environmental dimension of that One Health framework is really not up to speed with the level of knowledge of the others. This kind of monitoring can also help us to identify epidemiological links between the environment, humans and animals; then we can focus on those areas of transmission. We really need these large, comparable, longitudinal datasets to identify the drivers of AMR.”

Other areas include the need to inform risk assessment around regulatory limits, and to identify hot spots for the evolution and spread of AMR. “That way, we can focus our resources there, and we can identify treatment technologies that most effectively mitigate AMR,” says Pruden. There is also the potential to inform human and animal medicines regulation about which antibiotics will be most effective at population scales. Imagining doctors being able to check in real time on a mobile phone app, Pruden comments: “This last one is kind of a dream of mine.”

Picking up on the UNEP report, Pruden highlights areas where the water sector can contribute to progress, including continuing to design and operate treatment processes that produce excellent water quality. “These will surely also benefit AMR,” she says. Another is to work to identify which processes are most effective at removing antimicrobials, resistant bacteria, ARGs and mobile genetic elements (MGEs), and ones that do not increase these constituents. Another is the potential for source control, including at locations such as hospitals and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. Another is to look at the needs of locations currently without appropriate waste treatment. “Sadly, it is often the low- and middle-income countries that bear the burden of AMR,” adds Pruden.

She emphasises that there is a global, coordinated effort under way around AMR, so the sector is not alone. There are also wider opportunities to seek partners and co-benefits in relation to other contaminants of emerging concern.

Addressing the audience in Toronto, Pruden was also pleased to highlight that she is part of a team selected for a new US Environmental Protection Agency National Priorities grant focused on AMR. This was launched on 1 August, to be led by Lola Olabode, at the WRF. “Our focus is really going to be on filling many of these data gaps, and especially how we can inform risk assessment and move towards policy development that’s effective for combating AMR – and hopefully provide you all in the water sector with the information and tools you need to help the cause.”

More information

The ‘O’Neill Report’ – amr-review.org

UNEP report ‘Bracing for superbugs’ – www.unep.org/resources/superbugs/environmental-action

The Lancet report: ‘Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis’

2022 Environmental Science & Technology paper title: ‘Demonstrating a comprehensive wastewater-based surveillance approach that differentiates globally sourced resistomes’

Nature Communications report title: ‘Selection and horizontal gene transfer underlie microdiversity-level heterogeneity in resistance gene fate during wastewater treatment’

US EPA National Priorities project: ‘Quantifying wastewater sources of antibiotic resistance to aquatic and soil environments and associated health risks’

2022 Microbiome paper ‘Long-read metagenomic sequencing reveals shifts in associations of antibiotic resistance genes with mobile genetic elements from sewage to activated sludge’,

doi.org/10.1186/s40168-021-01216-5

The post Advancing action on AMR appeared first on The Source.

What is the Expert Committee for China’s Concept Wastewater Treatment Plants (CCWC) and what are its aims and objectives?

In early 2014, six prominent Chinese environmental experts, Jiuhui Qu, Kaijun Wang, Hongchen Wang, Gang Yu, Bing Ke, and Hanqing Yu, proposed constructing a futuristic urban wastewater treatment concept plant for China. Aimed at 2030-2040, their goal was to incorporate global best practices and advanced technologies to achieve ‘sustainable water quality, energy self-sufficiency, resource recovery, and environmental friendliness’. To support this vision, they formed the ‘Concept Plant Expert Committee’, which expanded to include nine members: Jiuhui Qu (Chair), Hongqiang Ren, Hanqing Yu, Gang Yu, Kaijun Wang, Hongchen Wang, Bing Ke, Xingcan Zheng, and Ji Li. Their mission is to create a concept plant surpassing current global standards by 20 years, transitioning China from a follower to a leader in wastewater treatment.

What are the key challenges for the Chinese water and wastewater sectors?

China has a large total water volume, yet per capita availability is low, at only about a quarter of the global average. Northern regions, in particular, face severe water scarcity. With rapid urbanisation and industrialisation China’s wastewater output has surged, giving it the world’s highest wastewater treatment volume, straining facilities near their operational limits.

A further challenge is the uniformity of national wastewater standards, which limit flexibility, particularly for economically underdeveloped regions, imposing high operational costs and resource waste in areas not sensitive to water issues.

Facilities face significant technical and financial challenges in upgrading to meet stricter standards, especially with the emergence of pollutants like pharmaceuticals and microplastics. In addition, many plants focus solely on pollutant removal, overlooking the potential to recover valuable resources from wastewater and sludge.

Wastewater treatment plants, particularly those using traditional processes, consume a large amount of energy and produce significant carbon emissions. There is a need for urgent energy and carbon reduction solutions if China is to meet its ‘dual carbon’ goals.

What are the most noteworthy aspects of the Yixing Concept Water Resource Reclamation Facility?

The Yixing plant uses anaerobic digestion to produce 3000 m3 of biogas daily, converted into 6000 kWh of electricity, reducing external energy dependency and lowering emissions.

Advanced purification technologies, such as ozone-UV disinfection for emerging pollutants, allow flexible upgrades, including mainstream Anammox (anaerobic ammonium oxidation) technology, for future water quality requirements.

Unlike traditional plants, Yixing transforms organic waste into products like nutrient-rich organic soil, reducing disposal pressure and supporting sustainable agriculture.

Innovative odour control, eco-friendly building designs, and community integration, minimise pollution and enhance biodiversity. In addition, the plant has engaged more than 50,000 community members in environmental education, raising awareness of sustainable water management, and its architectural design won an international award in 2023 for innovative health design.

What have been the key outcomes of the project?

Based on the water-energy-material recycling relationship in wastewater treatment, the concept plant redefines the mission of future wastewater treatment facilities, transforming the public’s perception and understanding of these plants. It conveys the message that wastewater is a resource, and wastewater treatment plants are resource plants.

The concept plant initiative has built five key technical systems to achieve water-energy-material regeneration:

• A Water Quality Safety System focusing on extreme nitrogen and phosphorus removal and the elimination of emerging pollutants.
• A Low-Carbon Technology System centred on processes such as fine filtration and sulphur-based autotrophy.
• A Regional Resource Synergy System using advanced dry anaerobic processing equipment.
• A Smart Management System based on digital twins and intelligent decision-making.
• An Eco-Complex Technology System that integrates elements of water quality, energy, resources and ecology.

The concept plant marks a milestone in China’s wastewater treatment industry, receiving recognition and support from industry stakeholders and spurring ongoing exploration and collaboration among government, industry, academia, and research sectors.

The Three Gorges Group plans to replicate the concept plant model along the Yangtze River over the next five years, implementing a chain-network model to create a series of innovative plants that will serve as effective tools for ecological management in the Yangtze region.

This project is supported by national key research and development funding, with the first implementation under way at the Fenghuangqiao Water Purification Plant in Lu’an, Anhui Province.

What are the future ambitions of the CCWC?

China’s concept plants will aim to meet stricter environmental requirements, focusing on new pollutants such as microplastics and pharmaceuticals. Further expansion of resource recovery will transform plants into resource producers rather than focusing solely on pollution control, and by advancing biomass energy technologies and reducing emissions, Yixing aims to support China’s ‘carbon peak’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ goals.

Future plants will increasingly rely on intelligent digital technologies to optimise resource use and energy efficiency. Our ambition is for China’s concept plant model and expertise to extend globally, aiding other regions in managing water resources and environmental protection challenges.

Future plants will integrate with their surroundings, incorporating eco-friendly architecture, green infrastructure, and community interaction, creating high-acceptance and environmentally friendly facilities.

Centred on a production-based R&D hub, it will bring together leading research talent to drive breakthroughs in core technologies, establishing itself as an incubator and prime site for cutting-edge applications, and through the demonstration of innovative technologies, the concept plant will continually enhance its treatment efficiency and resource recovery capabilities while also exporting advanced technological achievements across China and globally. This will further solidify its role as a benchmark technology demonstration base leading the future development of the industry.

Responses provided by Yifei Zhang, chairman of CSD Water Service Co, Changmin Wu, general manager of the Yixing Concept Plant, and Jifang Zhang, vice-general manager of the Yixing Concept Plant.

Read more about the IWA Project Innovation Awards at:

Global best in water projects announced at IWA 2024 Project Innovation Awards

The post Driving the standards of world-class wastewater treatment appeared first on The Source.

When we think about the digital transformation of the global water industry, we immediately start to jump to concepts such as digital twins, 3D physical models, and, of course, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. All of these technologies and their adoption into the mainstream are important as we move to a modern water industry. However, underpinning all of these technologies, to a greater or lesser extent, is data.

Data transformation

For me, the fundamental start to any data transformation journey (although this has been an unpopular opinion in the past) is stakeholder engagement. From the CEO of a water operating utility to the frontline operatives and technicians, there is a need for data and situational awareness – an understanding of how everything is operating from the grand scale of the whole utility to the individual scale of a single treatment works or pumping station.

Nowadays, in a water utility environment, all of this data is pushed into a data lake, or whatever data repository you choose (lake, pond, ocean, have all been touted). I believe the distinction is the size of data you have and whether it has been structured or is unstructured. This last point of whether the data is structured or unstructured is the important one here, and was the subject of an IWA project on meta-data that was concluded earlier in 2024.

Meta-data collection

IWA’s Meta-Data Collection and Organization (MetaCO) Task Group, led by Kris Villez, aimed to describe a number of data models – i.e., structured approaches to the management and storage of meta-data – that have been deployed successfully in recent years. In addition, its scientific and technical report included:

• Guidelines aimed at avoiding duplication of efforts and databases
• Current experience with applicable standards, such as open architectures, including Open Geospatial Consortium WaterML
• The potential of recently developed technologies, including block chain and ontology-based tools.

Meta-data collection will be essential to underpin the data lakes that are currently being proposed within the industry or are actively growing in size – giving the data the structure that it needs to be used effectively in a number of different applications.

Streamlining and accessibility

The industry as a whole has been brilliant at collecting data for a single purpose, but when a single piece of data is needed for multiple purposes – and potentially in multiple different databases or models – this is when things historically became unstuck. As the industry’s collection of data is increasing significantly, the lack of meta-data becomes a significantly larger problem as we enter the realms of big data.

UK duration monitoring programme

An example of this is the event duration monitoring programme in the UK and how it ties in with different datasets. Between 2014 and 2022, around 14,000 event duration monitors were installed on combined storm overflows. However, some of these were within the wastewater network and some were on the overflows from storm tanks.

The UK is moving – from a regulatory point of view – to install monitors on overflows to storm tanks, along with monitors on emergency overflows, in addition to flow meters measuring compliance with flow to treatment conditions across the country. This is on top of the water quality monitors that are going to be installed up- and downstream of all overflows to the environment.

From a non-regulatory perspective, the water companies are also using sensing and machine learning to look at wastewater network performance and blockages, with data coming in from tens of thousands of sensors.

What is not available currently is a system to join together all of this data so that it may be operated in a logical way. This, for example, could include sewer network level monitors working with regulatory event duration monitors to give an idea of the situational awareness of network performance – something that is happening with suppliers, however. In addition, current network performance indicators could work with the front end monitoring of wastewater treatment works in a way that is compatible with the water quality monitoring that is going to be installed over the coming decade.

By bringing this data together with models of the wastewater network, treatment works and the riverine environment, we would have a very powerful tool to not only monitor the performance of wastewater systems, but also their impact on riverine environments.

Underpinning the success of this is the availability and quality of the data – a subject that was addressed in the MetaCO scientific and technical report, ‘Digital Water: The value of meta-data for water resource recovery facilities’, which adds to other IWA work undertaken on this subject.

Garbage in, garbage out

We have all heard, or even potentially used, the phrase ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’. It was a phrase that was first used by William Mellin in the 1950s when the majority of instrumentation within the water industry was still mechanical. (Gustaf Olsson’s book, ICA and me, provides an insightful history of the development of instrumentation, control and automation [ICA] in water and wastewater.)

Mellin highlighted that if you put poor quality data into a computerised system, you will, of course, get garbage out – the computerised system will not realise what is and what is not useable data. For an industry that is increasingly using machine learning and trying to make sense of huge datasets to garner insights, poor quality data would make it impossible to see the wood for the trees.

While it may be laudable to collect data for the sake of collecting data, in reality there is a cost to gathering data, and if the value of that data is not recognised, then its collection will not be maintained. This point has been highlighted by an IWA Digital Water Programme White Paper on digital transformation and instrumentation, ‘Digital Water: The role of Instrumentation in Digital Transformation’, which proposed the concept of the instrumentation life-cycle.

Instrumentation life-cycle

The first part of the life-cycle asks the user to define the ‘instrumentation need’ – or, taking it up a step, the ‘data need’. If the need for the instrument is understood and the data that it provides has a value higher than its cost, then the data quality should be ensured.

Understanding uncertainty

The next step is to understand the uncertainty associated with the data, which was a subject that was covered in another IWA Digital Water Programme White Paper, ‘Measurement Uncertainty in Digital Transformation’, published in early 2024.

Next steps to digital transformation

As the water industry transforms digitally, ‘digital tools’ are going to help the sector address global challenges and targets – most importantly, the acceleration of the drive to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6, access to safe water and sanitation for all.

To manage water effectively, the industry as a whole needs to adopt the concepts that digital water offers. But we need to get the fundamentals right and ensure that the data collected is accurate and in a format that can be used. For this to be achieved, we need to garner the situational awareness to which I referred, to ensure data quality and understand its limitations through our knowledge of measurement uncertainty, so that we know what the data is for and where it fits into the system as a whole. Only by doing this will the water industry apply meta-data effectively.

More information

Digital Water: The value of meta-data for water resource recovery facilities, iwa-network.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IWA_2021_Meta-data_IWA.pdf

Olsson, G., ICA and me – A subjective review. Water Research (2012),46, (6), 1585-1624

See: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0043135411008487?via%3Dihub

Digital Water: The role of Instrumentation in Digital Transformation,

iwa-network.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/IWA_2020_Instrumentation_WEB.pdf

Measurement Uncertainty in Digital Transformation,

iwa-network.org/publications/digital-water-measurement-uncertainty-in-digital-transformation

The author: Oliver Grievson is an Associate Director at the global engineering consultancy AtkinsRéalis and a Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Digital Water at the University of Exeter. He is also Chair of IWA’s Digital Water Programme.

The post Digital data analysis – the devil is in the detail appeared first on The Source.

One is the article on p14 exploring the reuse of wastewater – or, more accurately, used water – in agriculture. Concerns about the pressures on water resources are forever increasing, not least because of climate change. Planned reuse of wastewater then becomes a policy option to pursue in response, with a need to find agriculture’s place in that planned reuse.

The potential here is clear. As the article highlights, less than 20% of wastewater is treated to a usable level. Of this treated water, 2-15% is reused for irrigation.

At the same time, this issue’s article on the ‘slow pandemic’ of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) highlights the dilemmas of trying to provide solutions. On the one hand, wastewater in this instance is the interface where microbes are exposed to antimicrobials – so is seemingly part of the problem. But the article signals that wastewater treatment tends to improve prospects around dealing with AMR – and so is also seemingly part of the solution.

Climate change is compounding the challenges of balancing multiple interests and factors around water. The Analysis article opposite summarises the findings of a report drawing attention to the plight of the most vulnerable section of global society – refugees.

Climate change is just part of the fragility that underpins this vulnerability. Conflict and, within that wider picture, forcible displacement have complex roots. But the climate dimension is there – in terms of the fact that a very high proportion of people fleeing their homes do so in countries where there is exposure to climate-related hazards, and also in terms of the more specific evidence for climate-related hazards being a driver for displacement.

A more recent report, The Global Threat of Drying Lands: Regional and global aridity trends and future projections, published by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification for its COP16 meeting in December, raises a wider-reaching concern. The report states that 77.6% of Earth’s land experienced drier conditions during the three decades leading up to 2020 compared with the previous 30-year period. Drylands expanded by about 4.3 million km2 and, as the planet continues to warm, the report’s worst-case scenario projections suggest up to 5 billion people could live in drylands by the end of the century.

This all emphasises the need for cohesive water sector strategies that have the buy-in of stakeholders.

In the article on p25, we see how Fiji, one of IWA’s newer Governing Members, is embarking on implementation of its 2050 water sector strategy. The strategy is built on a national collective planning exercise and we can see that IWA’s scope is of clear relevance to priorities highlighted. This includes core concerns such as addressing non-revenue water and regulatory matters such as tariffs. So too for the task of combining use of both centralised and decentralised approaches to wastewater treatment.

The water community around the world faces challenges in advancing sector strategies, especially given the scale of the task of balancing multiple interests and factors. Given such prospects, the need for solidarity and sharing of experiences is greater than ever.

Keith Hayward, Editor

The post Water’s balancing act appeared first on The Source.

You cannot buy happiness, but you can come to Fiji, and that’s pretty much the same thing. Most visitors to Fiji would testify that this Fiji Tourism tagline is as close to reality as it gets. Fiji is a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) in the South Pacific and one of the newest Governing Members of IWA. With a rich cultural heritage, beautiful landscapes and vibrant biodiversity, Fiji is a key hub for trade and tourism in the region.

As climate change intensifies in the Pacific, climate vulnerability of water systems under extreme weather events and rising sea levels is now endangering key water infrastructure, necessitating substantial investment in protective measures. SIDS in the Pacific are home to about 2.5 million people, living on hundreds of islands spread over the vast Pacific Ocean. The region covers nearly 15% of the Earth’s surface, with shared water security challenges and solutions.

When it comes to climate change, it is worth pointing out that, collectively, the Pacific SIDS contribute less than 1% of global emissions. However, when it comes to the impact of climate change, the Pacific is the Ground Zero in terms of the brunt of its potential impact.

Benchmarking data collected by the Pacific Water and Wastewater Association (a body representing water utilities from 21 countries of the Pacific) indicate high levels of non-revenue water (NRW) because of ageing infrastructure across the Pacific. In Fiji, an estimated 47% of water is lost to leaks and bursts in the water pipe network.

Strategic pillars

The Water Authority of Fiji (WAF) has unveiled an ambitious plan – the Water Sector Strategy 2050. This forward-looking $8.5 billion investment programme (over 27 years) aims to secure a sustainable and resilient future for Fiji’s water resources, ensuring every Fijian has access to clean and reliable water services. The Strategy is a direct outcome of the country’s first-ever national-level collective planning exercise that united stakeholders, from the public sector, private sector, tourism industry, NGOs, academia, development partners, and citizens. The document is not just a list of priority projects and investments; it is a shared vision for the water and sanitation future of Fiji.

As outlined in Figure 1, the Water Sector Strategy 2050 is built on five strategic pillars that provide a comprehensive approach to addressing water-related challenges. These strategic pillars ensure that the Strategy responds to climate vulnerability, focuses on renewing ageing infrastructure, contributes to the circular economy, enhances the natural environment, and builds on the long-term financial viability of the water sector itself.

Response strategies

• Tackling the challenge of non-revenue water (NRW)

The high level of NRW continues to be a significant challenge for the Water Authority of Fiji. WAF’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr Amit Chanan, explains: “Our pipe network is roughly 5,000 km, making it a significant challenge to identify and fix leaks. And that is why we are working with world-leading experts in NRW – who have the right expertise – to help us with this and build the capacity of our staff.”

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has reaffirmed its commitment to assist WAF in reducing NRW. Neeta Pokhrel, ADB Director to the Pacific, highlighted the ADB’s ongoing support, saying: “We are proud partners of the Water Authority of Fiji. We supported the Viria water treatment plant – one of the biggest water infrastructure projects built in Fiji in recent times. The next WAF project we are supporting is focused on reducing non-revenue water.”

In late September 2024, a performance based contract was awarded to Miya (a global efficiency-oriented water operator) for a water loss reduction project in the Suva-Nausori Region – home to the country’s capital city – and WAF’s flagship response strategy to address high NRW. A key feature of this five-year programme includes capacity building for WAF staff, who will be trained in best-practice water loss reduction.

• Focus on wastewater treatment upgrades

On the sanitation front, the Water Sector Strategy 2050 gives priority to wastewater management – prioritising the lion’s share of investment for improving wastewater treatment and access to safe sanitation.

A total of $5 billion is earmarked for wastewater management, with several high-priority projects identified. The Kinoya Wastewater Treatment Plant Upgrade is the first priority project, and aims to enhance capacity and efficiency, ensuring improved wastewater management for Suva. This project is vital for protecting the environment and public health, while supporting the region’s sustainable development. The ADB and the European Investment Bank (EIB) are supporting WAF with design development works that are already under way for the multi-million-dollar upgrade to the biggest wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) in the country.

In addition to Kinoya, the decentralised wastewater management strategy for Greater Suva will see limitations on wastewater volume currently being pumped over long distances to the Kinoya WWTP, with plans for two additional treatment plants to be built in the Lami and Nausori areas. The strategy will also address the backlog of sewerage works and upgrades to the wastewater network around Kinoya. Tenders for construction works for the Kinoya WWTP upgrade are planned to be called by mid-2025.

• Strengthening financial viability

A financially viable WAF will be critical to the delivery of the Water Sector Strategy 2050. Therefore, a financial model that reduces dependency on public sector grants is one of the key strategic pillars of the Strategy. With assistance from the ADB, Fiji’s Competition and Consumer Commission has recently commenced a tariff review for water services.

If implemented, these tariff reforms have the capacity to strengthen the water sector’s financial viability. It is also expected to enhance WAF’s operational efficiency, ensuring sustainable and reliable water services for all Fijians. Fiji’s Water Sector Strategy 2050 is a bold and timely step towards a secure water future. By focusing on climate resilience, infrastructure health, sustainable development and community engagement, Fiji is setting an example for SIDS across the Pacific and globally. The Strategy underscores the importance of global collaboration and peer-to-peer learning in addressing water challenges. Many IWA members – both individuals and organisations – have been invaluable international partners who have supported the WAF team in developing the Water Sector Strategy 2050, and have been key in shaping a resilient and sustainable water future for Fiji.

The authors:

Juliet Korovou and Peni M Shute are from the Communications & Stakeholder Engagement Department of the Water Authority of Fiji (WAF)

The post Fiji’s Water Sector Strategy 2050 appeared first on The Source.

The day was structured into three sessions, covering industry best practices, collaboration with regulators and research institutes, and strategies to overcome long returns on investments in water technologies. A common theme emerged: the critical importance of collaboration across sectors to address current and future water challenges.

Innovation in industrial water management

Several innovative technologies and approaches were highlighted during the forum, demonstrating the potential for significant improvements in industrial water efficiency:

PFAS remediation: Dr Mohamed Ateia Ibrahim, from Rice University, USA, emphasised that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for PFAS remediation. With more than 10,000 chemicals containing PFAS on the market, new technologies are being explored to meet increasingly stringent regulations. The path forward requires collaboration between academia, start-ups, solution providers, and end-users to develop effective strategies for addressing current issues and transitioning to fluorine-free alternatives.

Energy conservation in cooling systems: Alain Silverwood, from Xylem, presented a two-year study on the energy impact of microsand filtration in open cooling water systems. The collaborative effort between academia, solution providers and end-users demonstrated that proper filtration could reduce biofilms and energy consumption by up to 13%, resulting in significant cost savings for industrial facilities.

Resource recovery from waste streams:

Dr Christopher Lawson, from the University of Toronto, Canada, shared insights into a new technology that ‘retools’ anaerobic digestion for waste-to-chemical biomanufacturing. This innovative approach converts food waste into medium chain fatty acids, potentially reducing carbon footprints by recycling chemicals and materials.

Collaboration: The key to success

The forum emphasised that collaboration is crucial for addressing water challenges effectively. This was evident in the organising committee itself, which included representatives from Xylem, Veolia and Grundfos. Throughout the sessions, speakers highlighted successful partnerships between industry, academia and regulatory bodies.

Industry-academia partnerships: The cooling water filtration study and the waste-to-chemical biomanufacturing project both demonstrated the value of collaboration between universities and industry partners. These partnerships allow for rigorous scientific research to be applied to real-world industrial challenges.

Regulatory collaboration: Mohamed Ateia Ibrahim’s presentation on PFAS remediation highlighted the need for cooperation between regulators, researchers and industry, to develop effective solutions that meet increasingly stringent environmental standards.

Cross-sector initiatives: Jason Morrison, President of the Pacific Institute and Head of the UN Global Compact CEO Water Mandate, discussed engagement opportunities that bring together corporate leaders to address water management challenges collectively.

Overcoming barriers to innovation

The forum also addressed the challenges of implementing new water technologies, particularly regarding the ‘valleys of death’ that can occur when transferring solutions from research to industry. The panel discussion in the third session explored strategies to overcome these barriers:

Technology readiness levels: Panellists discussed the importance of understanding and supporting the various stages of technology development, from basic research (Level 1) to successful application (Level 9).

Funding and guidance: Seth Darling, from Argonne National Laboratory, USA, explained how national laboratories provide crucial support to help researchers scale up their investigations.

Regulatory incentives: Regulatory agencies play a role in encouraging technology development by identifying critical water quality issues and promoting energy reduction and resource recovery.

Corporate leadership: The CEO Water Mandate provides a platform for corporate decision-makers to collaborate on finding innovative water management solutions.

Industry investment: Representatives from Veolia, Grundfos and Dow Chemical shared examples of how their companies invest in, and refine, new water treatment technologies for their clients.

The future outlook

The Industrial Water Forum highlighted the growing pressure to accelerate the development and implementation of water-efficient technologies. Despite the challenges, participants expressed optimism about future breakthroughs in industrial water management. Key areas for future focus include:

• Continued development of PFAS remediation technologies and alternatives to ‘forever chemicals’.
• Further exploration of energy-saving technologies in industrial water systems.
• Advancement of resource recovery techniques from waste streams.
• Expansion of nature-based solutions for industrial water management.
• Improved communication and collaboration between researchers, technology developers, regulators, and end-users to streamline the innovation process.

Conclusion

The Industrial Water Forum served as a vital platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration in the face of growing water challenges. By bringing together diverse stakeholders, the event fostered discussions on cutting-edge technologies, best practices, and strategies for overcoming barriers to innovation. As industrial water use continues to increase globally, the insights and connections made during this forum will play a crucial role in shaping a more sustainable and water-efficient industrial future.

Moving forward, continued collaboration across sectors will be essential to drive innovation, overcome implementation challenges, and achieve significant improvements in industrial water efficiency. By building on the momentum generated at this forum, stakeholders in the industrial water sector can work together to develop and implement solutions that address current and future water challenges, ensuring a more sustainable and resilient future for industry and the environment alike.

The authors: Lærke Nørgaard Madsen is a water treatment application specialist at Grundfos; Michael Skovgaard is Business Development Regional Director, Americas, at Grundfos; Walt Kozlowski is Senior Director Industrial Sustainability Solutions at Xylem; and Youngseck Hong is Principal Engineer at Veolia Water Technologies & Solutions

The post Industrial Water Forum 2024 Innovations and collaborations for a sustainable future appeared first on The Source.

Achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.1 – universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water – is a critical global challenge. While developed nations generally meet water accessibility standards, sub-Saharan Africa struggles with significant deficits in basic water services, affecting more than 336 million people. Nigeria exemplifies these challenges, with more than 40 million Nigerians lacking access to improved water sources and nearly half of its water infrastructure assets being non-functional or failed. This poses a critical issue given Nigeria’s rapid population growth. Addressing these infrastructure failures and ensuring sustainability is crucial to achieving SDG 6.1 in Nigeria.

Why are infrastructure assets in Nigerian communities failing?

Water infrastructure, such as boreholes, often fail because of issues ranging from poor planning in the pre-construction phase to lack of maintenance post-construction. A systematic review conducted by Adeoti et al. (2023), published in Water Policy, the official journal of the World Water Council, identified 265 factors causing infrastructure asset failures based on the analysis of 15 studies. These factors were grouped into 52 distinct themes and categorised into technical, financial, environmental, social, political, and institutional factors.

The complexity of these multifaceted issues requires a comprehensive approach and framework to navigate. However, there is no such framework in Nigeria. Consequently, the authors proposed a sustainability framework for water infrastructure in Nigeria, encompassing all stages of water development.

Creating a framework for sustainable projects

Developing a comprehensive framework requires an iterative research cycle based on a transdisciplinary research method. This method draws knowledge from various sectors, including industry experts, academia, government officials, and end users.

Through transdisciplinary PhD research, we have been dedicated to addressing the high failure rate of water infrastructure in Nigeria. We conduct our research by creating conceptual solutions, piloting them, collecting and analysing data, and continuously refining our approach. This iterative process helps us understand challenges, identify effective strategies, and build a sustainable framework for water infrastructure.

Our recent research (Adeoti et al. 2024), published in IWA’s journal Water Supply, challenges the prevalent assumption that state-level poverty metrics are reliable indicators of community water infrastructure and poverty conditions. The state-wide multi-dimensional poverty index often fails to capture the nuanced and localised challenges faced by individual communities. Precision mapping and comprehensive surveys are essential for identifying specific community needs and interrelated challenges.

The study also examined borehole failure trajectories and classified states of functionality to mirror the actual conditions encountered on the ground, improving understanding of how boreholes transition from full operation to total failure and abandonment. The examination noted the lack of functionality monitoring and the absence of preventive maintenance as contributing factors. The study proposed the need for smart infrastructure for monitoring and data collection, enabling historical trend analysis and pre-emptive maintenance. Consequently, the study proposed that a holistic approach to water infrastructure sustainability must include mapping and constructing smart water infrastructure to ensure long-term sustainability.

What is mapping and why is it important?

As previously mentioned, more than 40 million Nigerians lack access to clean drinking water, yet the precise locations of these individuals remain unknown. Addressing people’s problems effectively requires understanding of where they live and the interrelated challenges they face. A mapping project aims to ascertain the locations of people suffering from extreme water poverty, identify the interrelated challenges they face, and gather necessary data to develop tailored and sustainable solutions for their communities.

A pilot project to test the feasibility of this mapping project was conducted across 1696 communities in three Nigerian states. The outcome demonstrated that mapping is essential, important, and achievable for creating tailored solutions that meet community needs and ensure longevity. The data on the mapped communities is kept up to date through communication with community caretakers identified during the initial mapping.

How smart water infrastructure can solve the problem

Smart Water Kiosk case study

Smart water infrastructure, leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) technology, enhances the efficiency and sustainability of water supply systems. By integrating sensors and smart meters, these systems collect extensive data, enabling proactive maintenance and strategic water resource management. This case study examines how the implementation of an initial Smart Water Kiosk (SWK) in a mapped community provided key insights, ultimately leading to the development of a more advanced mobile SWK.

Implementation and insights from the initial Smart Water Kiosk

The SWK was introduced as a pilot project to test the viability of smart water infrastructure. It was equipped with IoT devices capable of monitoring water flow, detecting leaks, and tracking the volume of water sold or dispensed. Over a three-year period (2021 to 2024), the SWK collected extensive data that proved crucial in assessing its effectiveness and guiding necessary adjustments.

Initially, the kiosk achieved a Self-Sustainability Rating (SSR) of 22%. However, uncoordinated aid efforts from another NGO, which installed a free-use water well within the community, led to an overlap of aid that drastically reduced this rating to zero. This overlap caused a significant drop in kiosk usage as residents opted for the free option, undermining their willingness to pay and threatening the kiosk’s sustainability. Consequently, water had to be provided for free to prevent abandonment. Despite this challenge, the kiosk eventually achieved a 100% Sustainability Rating (SR) through external support and maintained a high Reliability Rating (RR) of 97.1%, remaining operational for 1063 out of 1095 days.

Development of the mobile Smart Water Kiosk

The challenges and insights from the initial SWK informed the development of a mobile SWK, equipped with a water treatment plant. Designed to address the issue of aid overlap, the mobile kiosk offers flexibility, allowing it to be relocated when no longer needed or when similar aid initiatives arise in a community. This adaptability ensures that the infrastructure remains functional, sustainable, and effectively serves communities with genuine water needs, preventing redundancy and ensuring optimal resource utilisation.

Recommendations

The SWK case study demonstrates the significant potential of smart water infrastructure in addressing water poverty and infrastructure failures in Nigeria. The iterative process of designing, piloting, data collection, analysis, and redesign proved essential in developing resilient and sustainable solutions that cater to specific community needs. Mapping played a crucial role in this process, ensuring interventions were both effective and aligned with the realities faced by communities.

To build on these insights and ensure the long-term sustainability of water infrastructure projects, the following policy recommendations are proposed:

• Coordinate aid with centralised water management: Establish a centralised water asset database to prevent aid overlap and ensure efficient resource allocation. This system would help coordinate all water infrastructure projects, directing efforts towards communities with genuine needs, thereby avoiding redundancy and ensuring that contributions are complementary and sustainable.
• Adopt an iterative research and development approach: Implement an iterative research and development cycle, treating each water project as an ongoing pilot for innovation. This approach facilitates systematic data collection, identifies best practices, and allows continuous improvement. By refining smart water management practices based on real time data and community feedback, every project contributes valuable insights to enhance the design and implementation of future water infrastructure initiatives.

By learning from data and analysis, combined with lived experience, and a model that can adapt to community needs, this project has evolved, enabling it to be more flexible, sustainable and resilient.

The authors

Oluwagbemi Samuel Adeoti is a transdisciplinary PhD researcher at the University of Technology, Sydney, and CEO of Fairaction International

Saravanamuthu Vigneswaran is Emeritus Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Technology, Sydney, and an IWA Distinguished Fellow

More information

For more details and access to the mapped communities, please visit:

https://target6.1map.management

Adeoti, O. S., Kandasamy, J., & Vigneswaran, S. (2023). Water infrastructure sustainability in Nigeria: a systematic review of challenges and sustainable solutions. Water Policy, 25(11), 1094-1111. doi.org/10.2166/wp.2023.173

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381280963_Water_infrastructure_sustainability_challenge_in_Nigeria_A_detailed_examination_of_infrastructure_failures_and_potential_solutions

doi.org/10.2166/ws.2024.127

The post Smart solutions – a Nigerian answer to access appeared first on The Source.

The Utility Leaders Forum, in Toronto, Canada, in August 2024, provided a unique opportunity for utility leaders to exchange views, network, and access insights in a setting designed by utility leaders for utility leaders. The forum was an overwhelming success and focused on three key topics: building water security and resilience; utility breakthroughs on climate adaptation; and utilities working to improve the circular economy.

I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate the forum’s organising committee for its commitment and dedication in delivering a valuable event, and providing a great opportunity for engagement, networking and collaboration. This is the hallmark of our globally respected IWA brand. Utility leaders in Toronto also had the opportunity to express their views on their needs and expectations of IWA. Sincere thanks and appreciation to all delegates who shared their thoughts, which will form the foundation of new offerings from IWA to satisfy the needs of all utility members.

Water utilities face many challenges, while customer and consumer expectations are increasing. Customers and consumers expect utilities to be properly governed, managed, and staffed with the best expertise for them to rise to the challenges and impacts of climate change – and any other risks to sustainable service delivery. Therefore, utilities are expected to mitigate all conceivable risks to satisfy customers’ needs.

To this end, utilities need to embrace digitalisation, mobilise innovative technology, review planning and strategic asset management, drive efficiencies, and reduce the carbon footprint of their operations. The circular economy is a socio-economic paradigm to which water utilities must adapt if ambitions to achieve global climate goals are to be achieved. The water sector needs to play a leading role through increased reuse and recycling, and the creation of new products for the market.

Water scarcity is not a new phenomenon for large parts of the world. Through the decades, water utilities have adapted successfully with access only to minimal resources. Climate change and population increases have created additional challenges for sustainable water and sanitation provision. During the past decade, countries such as the Netherlands and the UK have experienced unprecedented water scarcity and are now engaging in innovative projects to address this risk. Many leading utilities are focused on proactive interventions to assure water security by reducing leaks, recycling water for reuse, transforming waste into value added products, and adopting technologies such as water efficient sanitation systems.

The role of IWA is to inspire change and create impact by ensuring water utilities have access to the latest knowledge and technologies, by sharing information to the benefit of utilities and their stakeholders. Utility leaders need to interact, connect and engage with their peers and colleagues across the globe to gain access to best practices that will empower them to improve their utilities.

IWA recognises the leading role it needs to play as a membership organisation for utility members, and is in the process of reviewing and improving to enhance value propositions and services for utilities. This is an exciting time for IWA and water utilities. I am confident that, together, we can build resilient and sustainable water utilities that will inspire the confidence of customers and consumers across the world.

Hamanth Kasan, President, IWA

The post The natural home for water utilities appeared first on The Source.

What are the key challenges for capacity building in the sanitation sector for amplifying/mainstreaming or institutionalising the Citywide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) framework and principles?

Osward M Chanda, IUS Advisory Board member

To empower relevant stakeholders and organisations in general – and onsite sanitation in particular – advocacy and awareness campaigns should be the starting point for decision-makers to understand and prioritise onsite sanitation systems in addition to conventional sewerage systems.

Service providers do not consider non-sewered systems as part of their scope of responsibilities. New sanitation approaches, including non-sewered sanitation, and non-conventional approaches to sewerage services will require a change of mindset. Thus, there is a need to prioritise capacity enhancement around CWIS frameworks and principles for all sanitation professionals.

There are insufficient financial resources and incentives to undertake capacity building activities at local level. There is the need for a sustainable sanitation financing framework with specific allocation towards capacity building activities, and work must be undertaken to address the unclear legal and regulatory environment to improve action on capacity building.

Stakeholder coordination for mainstreaming CWIS principles is critical for the institutionalisation of CWIS principles among communities, community-based organisations, local authorities, service providers/utilities, funders and line ministries.

As little attention is paid to the poor and the most vulnerable in society – those who stand to benefit more from the CWIS framework and principles – for CWIS to be successful there is the need for advocacy and capacity building, so the people who stand to benefit the most are carried along in the mainstreaming process.

Engagement through mobilisation, sensitisation and advocacy (as part of capacity building activities with communities, including social and gender mainstreaming) would enable the CWIS framework to be better tailored to offer solutions that address the distinct requirements of communities.

Finally, data collection remains a challenge. Data is essential to drive the process of institutionalising CWIS, as the sanitation sector traditionally has lacked the technical capabilities and proper tools needed to gather, manage and analyse sanitation data across the sanitation value chain.

There is a need for robust data collection and management systems to provide a basis for evidence based policy decision-making, and ensuring that these data systems can inform and monitor city-level, sector and national progress of CWIS.

Annabell Waititu, IWA IUS Task Force member and Vice President of Programmes at Big Five Africa

CWIS is a significantly new shift from the traditional model of sanitation. In the past, everybody looked on sanitation as the responsibility of the household. Because of this, policies are inadequate to support institutions adopting CWIS. So, we need to be thinking where we should begin.

In terms of capacity building, it is very important for us to ask ourselves who needs what training and what policies are available. For example, in Kenya the regulator was only focused on water services, but now they must regulate sanitation as well – yet they don’t have standards for sanitation, and it is difficult for these to be decided upon. Regulation is difficult if the standards are not there, and it is unclear what the rules are for different organisations. Things are very unclear, and policies are needed to guide decision-makers.

Service providers such as the water utilities in Kenya were not dealing with civil sanitation previously, so we need to look at the kind of staffing and the skills we have – expertise in non-sewered sanitation for example. It will take time to come up with good policies that will address all the issues and all the interests of the individuals concerned, as well as introducing the different kinds of technologies that should be working to improve sanitation for communities. Water service providers have engineers who can deal with civil engineering, but they don’t have expertise in CWIS.

Please could you provide an example of success that would be valuable to others in the sector.

Chanda says:

Incorporating the CWIS approach in infrastructure planning has not only proven to be efficient, but has also provided a range of solutions/models that have shown a lot of positive impacts.

In Kenya, during feasibility studies for four water supply and sewerage projects, the approach led to the scaling up of CWIS integration in most programmes implemented by other water and sanitation development agencies.

The CWIS SAP tool for investment decision-making led to modelling of different investment scenarios, such as use of sewer only, mixed use (sewer and non-sewered sanitation) and onsite sanitation, to determine the best investment option.

The implementing agencies gained from additional data collected on the number and type of containment, transport and treatment systems, which informed decision-making. They then came up with service delivery mechanisms and different business models to incentivise the private sector and ensure there are options for revenue generation for the utility. Those agencies used the improved terms of reference that incorporate CWIS activities and qualified CWIS personnel in their new consultancy assignments.

In Zambia, the Lusaka sanitation programme has carried out a successful city-wide capacity building intervention, involving all actors and laying the foundations for understanding the city’s sanitation challenges, inculcating and equipping them with the essential knowledge framework and resources to plan, execute and oversee the CWIS approach as part of their day-to-day mandate.

The actors are the Lusaka City Council, Ministry of Health, and Lusaka Water and Sewerage Company (LWSSC). As part of capacity building initiatives, the project supported and operationalised the LWSSC sanitation monitoring system. This is fully integrated with other software systems of the Lusaka City Council and the Ministry of Health, enabling data aggregation, reducing duplication, and enabling actors to implement and manage their various programmes and projects in the sanitation sector. It also provides them with analytical tools to analyse and improve decision-making. At the strategic level, it enables government, through the Ministry of Water Development and Sanitation, to transparently see the performance of the sanitation sector.

Waititu says:

We have had quite a bit of success in Nairobi,because we have seen a few projects that are really addressing the issue of non-sewered sanitation, looking at the entire value chain and making sure that the construction of sanitation facilities is appropriate. These projects have worked with local communities to ensure that sewage is captured and contained. They have also provided education on the importance of appropriate containment. This environment has helped develop partnerships and improve opportunities for investment.

Attention is being given to the safe transportation of sewage for treatment. The waste is then treated and turned into fuel, with products produced for industrial and household use.

There is also work being done to professionalise manual sanitation work, providing better training, uniforms, PPE and other equipment, accompanied by education for communities about what is suitable to be disposed of in sanitation facilities, which has helped sanitation workers do their work more efficiently. This has made a huge difference. Manual sanitation workers are now professional and respected, and they are supporting the whole process of sanitation in informal settlements in urban areas. l

More information

iwa-network.org/projects/inclusive-sanitation

The post The importance of capacity building appeared first on The Source.