India, New Delhi: using Facebook and SMS to keep the city clean

With this photo on Facebook local resident Akshay Arora asks the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to "kindly send some one and get it clean this Toilet/Urinal". One day later on 7 April 2011, MCD replied: "Your complaint reference no. is 02/0704/SP"

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) launched its Facebook page in January 2011 and an integrated SMS service in March 2011 to enable public monitoring of garbage collection sites and public urinals/toilets in areas under its jurisdiction.The first experiences were positive as illustrated by the example of 22-year-old Piyush Goyal posted his complaint of garbage spilling over from the dump in his area.

On January 8, he clicked pictures of the seven dirty ones in South Delhi’s R K Puram area and posted them on Facebook. And the next day, he says, he saw the pictures of clean dhalaos uploaded by the MCD.

“There is lot of transparency through this way. The man who actually cleans it asked me why I uploaded the pictures. So the information is going from top to the bottom,” says Goyal.

MCD additional commissioner (engineering) Anshu Prakash added:

“This system is increasing transparency, fixing accountability and putting everything under public scrutiny. And none of us like to be ashamed in public. So people have started working at the bottom”.

Battling cholera with NFC RFID-tracked drinking water in Haiti

Deep Springs International (DSI), a non-profit organization based in Pennsylvania, USA, and Nokia Research Center (NRC), Palo Alto, California, are teaming up to ensure the supply of clean drinking water in Haiti with NFC (near field communication) technology.

DSI has been delivering water treatment systems (which essentially consist of a covered 19-liter bucket with a spigot at the bottom) and a locally manufactured chlorine solution it has labeled Gadyen Dlo (Creole for "water guardian") since 2007.. Photo: Michael Ritter, DSI

Water treatment kits are being provided to track chlorine levels in household drinking water using NFC-enabled cell phones. NRC provided the health workers with approximately 50 Nokia 6212 NFC-enabled phones while UPM RFID supplied UPM BullsEye™ NFC tags with NXP Mifare Ultralight chip. Joseph “Jofish” Kaye, Senior Research Scientist, NRC, initiated the project together with David Holstius, a student and Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health, who developed the software application for mobile phones.

Families in the most rural areas in Haiti will have one water treatment kit consisting of a five-gallon (19 litre) plastic bucket with a lid and spigot. The RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags are attached to buckets for storing the treated drinking water and delivered to families together with a chlorine solution and written instructions for using the kit. When DSI’s water technicians visit their homes, they check whether they are using the kits properly and provide additional chlorine solutions. The technicians will read the tags using NFC cell phones loaded with software guiding them to ask relevant questions about the water being tested. They then send the data to DSI’s headquarters via SMS. The software application uses the Frontline SMS platform.

Can technology end poverty? Not on its own, says Kentaro Toyama

Kentaro Toyoma

Research in ICT4D shows that “technology — no matter how well designed — is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity [and] not a substitute”. This is one of the main messages from Kentaro Toyama’s lead article in a forum on the role of information and communication technology in global development.

Another lesson from Toyama own experience in India is that “myth of scale is the religion of telecenter proponents, who believe that bringing the Internet into villages is enough to transform them”.

His thought-provoking article has several quotes related to the continuing discussions on whether the promotion of mobile phones is detracting attention to and finance for basic services like drinking water and sanitation.

Monitoring: Water for People launches Android app

US NGO Water for People has launched a visual technology called FLOW, Field Level Operations Watch.

Using Android cell phone technology and Google Earth software, FLOW provides anyone on the Internet access to data for projects supported by Water For People. This visual open-source data monitoring database was developed by Gallatin Systems.

Field data about water points or sanitation systems can be collected by community members, project staff etc. with an Android phone and uploaded on to Google Maps and Google Earth. Flow integrates GPS tagging and a photo for each entry. Users can review and edit data right on their Android phone in the field.

FLOW will focus on these key indicators:

• Is the water point or sanitation solution being used and functioning?
• How many people have access to water and sanitation in the area?
• Are the services able to expand with the community?
• Is the quantity and quality of water meeting the needs of the community?
• Are sufficient tariffs being collected to ensure ongoing operation, maintenance, repair and eventual replacement?

Local data can be merged with other datasets.

For instance, in Malawi, he [Dru Borden of Gallatin Systems], says, UNICEF has already done a survey of all 54,000 water points in the country. You can download that to the phone, and have FLOW give you GPS directions to each site to check up on, pesky missing street signs be damned. If you compress the surveys, they are so small you can fit millions on a microSD card. That means you don’t actually need a data connection everywhere you go–just somewhere to power the phone.

Once you get back to cell service, and upload the data, it runs on Google’s app engine. The data can be stored in the cloud on a variety of services, so FLOW will be essentially free for the average organization to run, once they buy the smartphones. That equipment cost is the catch. Buying the phones is certainly the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of FLOW, but Borden estimates the unit cost will be about $99 with the release of a cheaper Android handset in Kenya within a year. Right now his firm has been testing it out on Droids and other more expensive models.

A demo of Flow is available on Google Earth at watermapmonitordev.appspot.com

Flow should be posted on Google’s Android Market app store sometime in November 2010.

See below a video interview with Water for People’s CEO Ned Breslin

Other similar new mapping tools include:

• h2.0 Monitoring Service to Inform and Empower Initiativelaunched by the h2.0 consortium
• Water Point Mapper developed by WaterAid

Source: Water for People ; Alex Goldmark, Fast Company, 26 Oct 2010

Akvopedia sanitation portal – now in French

The Akvo Sanitation Portal is now also available in French. This presents Akvo’s first step on the road to a true multi-language platform, and hopefully this new effort will be useful to french-speaking people around the world.

The new French portal contains 54 detailed articles on a wide range of sanitation technologies. The material was adapted from the extremely useful Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies (2008, French version here), written by Elisabeth Tilley and colleagues of Sandec, the Department of Water and Sanitation in Developing Countries at eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland. At a later date, the publication will also be made available in Spanish.

The French version of the Sandec Compendium of Sanitation Systems

Mobile technology: cell phones, Google Apps help bring basic sanitation and more transparency in Kenya

Nuru International, a US-based nonprofit focused on pioneering holistic, sustainable solutions to poverty, is using some Google platforms and Nokia phones to increase sanitation in Kuria, Kenya.

The organization has registered a Kenyan web domain name and created an account with Google Apps, providing access to each of the 60 Kenyan staff members. GPRS-enabled handsets have been purchased for about $40 apiece, and using these phones they can email one another very inexpensively.

“We’re using the best technology available to reach our farmers. Nokia made a great phone. Safaricom built a strong GPRS network. Opera coded a superb browser. And Google made a truly remarkable suite of applications. They’re all unintentionally working together with Nuru. According to our motto, we’re bringing the best of the best to serve the poorest of the poor.” Said David Carreon, Nuru Healthcare Project Manager.

“We use the phones during data collection for sanitation and hygiene and also the Community Healthcare Workers instead of writing use the phone to submit data. “ Said Nelly Andega, Nuru Health Care Manager.

The teams use the cameras on the phone to photograph and video the sites they’re supervising and upload the images, keeping a permanent and searchable record of all their supervision activities. And, the use of Google Sheet is keeping their organization paper free, further reducing the cost of operations from supplies to office space.

Read more about the technologies used in David Carreon’s blog post “Farmers Fighting Poverty with Nokia Google Opera and Safaricom“, 20 May 2010

Another unexpected advantage of the use of cell phones is increased transparency. Google forms on the phone are now used to register attendance at important trainings. “Even the Water and Sanitation Representatives [volunteer community educators] have come earlier”, says Eliza, a Water and Sanitation Field Manager. “They know that the phone records the time that I submit whether they are on time, late or absent. So, they don’t even ask me to change their records anymore. With the phones, there is no cheating.”

Web site: Nuru International – Water & Sanitation

Source: Jaymi Heimbuch, Planet Green, 21 May 2010 ; Nicole Scott, Nuru Water and Sanitation blog, 01 Jun 2010