 Hello everyone and welcome everyone to our webinar. My name is Dana Posti and we PhD student at Tel Aviv University and I will be your moderator for today. So please join me in welcoming Professor Adas Malan. Professor Malan is the head of the Environmental Engineering Programme at Tel Aviv University and IUBA vice president for the Europe Middle East Africa region. She is an expert in disinfection and oxidation of water and wastewater using solar, UV, and ozone technology to create this centralized system for safe water in rural and low-income areas. Professor Malan is also committed to provide safe water in developing countries currently serving as a visiting faculty at IIT Madras, India. Hello everyone, thank you Dana. So first I'd like to thank everyone for joining this joint webinar between the IWA and the IUBA which is dedicated to our most important resource which is actually water. So IUBA is the International Ultravalid Association. It's a non-profit organization and a vibrant family with scientists, engineers, vendors, and regulators that discuss issues related to UV disinfection. Okay, so everyone actually should get access to clean water and UV disinfection can play a role in it. In 2021 Nathan Moran and I established a new task force that supports the UN SDG-6 to provide safe water for all. UV disinfection does not require chemicals, it does not change the taste of water and is efficient in providing safe water therefore it could support the UN SDG-6. Also the burden of safe water falls mostly on women and girls, especially in low-income settings. And this was our inspiration for this webinar. Our task force members come from various places in the world with different settings and different experience. However the reality of the UV disinfection is not implemented widely. Next slide please. So how are we doing this? We set first meetings with organizations such as the World Bank and others. Next slide please. We also promoted discussion with peoples around the globe and to understand their experiences and best practices. Next slide please. We created a selection of 19 case studies that highlight the wide range of UV disinfection systems being implemented in decentralized water treatment, a real humanitarian relief and low and middle income study. The case studies cover a wide range of projects and multiple scales including schools, hospitals, communities, households and healthcare facilities across all the continents around the world. Moreover we established a white paper that looks at the different case studies and looks at the background, the UV systems, the outcomes and the lessons learned. We invite you to join our efforts in submitting case studies through our IUBA website. Thank you very much Dana, back to you. Okay so to start we will conduct a quick poll to learn about who are you and what motivation to join us today. So let's get started. So in one here you can see that the poll is appear and in one minute we will share the results. Okay so please let me know when we can share it. Okay interesting so thank you very much for that and now let's start with our speakers. I'm excited to introduce our first speaker Dr. Bhavani Rao. Dr. Rao, the Dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Science at Amrita University, a top ranked university based in Kerala, India. Dr. Rao is not only the director of two research centers, the first one, the Amrita multi-model application using computer and human interaction lab and the center for women's empowerment and gender equality but also holds the distinguished position of India's UNESCO chair in gender equality and women's empowerment since 2016. She is currently the co-coordinate of the working group on gender equality and disabilities for Civil 20. Dr. Bhavani has led numerous field and research projects funded by international and national institutions focusing on technology based training for underserved communities especially women in rural India. Her work has been recognized through numerous publications, patents and awards. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Bhavani Rao. Thank you Dana for that very warm welcome. Hello everyone, I can see that people are here from all over the world so hi from the south of India. I'm just going to give you a quick idea about some of the work that we do not go into it too technically but just like an overview. First let me set the context, just the context in India. We are a very large country in terms of our population, the second largest in the world right now and 70% of India's water sources are contaminated. And the levels of water in our major reservoirs have fallen to 21% of the average just over the last decade. As you know, I'm sure that most of you know that India is a very large consumer and producer of both rice and wheat. 54% of the country's groundwater is declining faster than it is replenished and 75% of the households do not have drinking water on their premises. 84% of the rural households do not have access to piped water. And the declining water table causes also with it is increase of toxic elements within the water. So specifically of how does it impact people? Most in most many Indians face very high levels of stress, water stress. This is according to our country's annual reports produced by NPIO on the SDGs and the performance of the country towards the SDGs. The dependence on a very erratic, I'm sure that you know that probably related to climate change but the monsoon seasons are not predictable and this puts also a lot of dependence on groundwater. There's lack of water connections and toilets are still over the large parts of the country and this leads to waterborne illnesses, stunting in many parts of India and of course at times death. We have 18% of the world's population but only 4% of the water resources of the world and 15% of Indians population practices open depacation at about 200 million of people. Sometimes they have toilets but they just won't use it. More than 6% of India's population of 1.3 billion which is approximately 91 million lack access to safe water and this is the very grim outlook that we have in the Indian context when it comes to water. So I'd like to talk to you about women, water and sanitation and the link between these. As you know, the reason that we work with women is women are the keepers of all the vulnerable populations. They're the ones who care for children, they care for the elderly, they care for the disabled, they care for the water resources, the fields, the cattle and the environment as a whole while being vulnerable themselves. And therefore the largest impact that we feel we have in especially rural India is through the women. Women and water especially in rural situations are very intellect when women are the ones who go to fetch water on a daily basis with an exception of very few communities. In fact, there was a very interesting exercise that we did in human-robot interaction. So we dressed an autonomous robot as a water carrier with no gender and the robot would go and bring water from the source and deliver it at the doorsteps of the people. And while we were questioning people about their perception of the robot and we asked them what gender they thought the robot had and the robot had was given a male voice. It spoke in a male voice and it looked nondescriptive. But people automatically gave assigned the gender of the robot as female and when asked why they did that is because the robot brought water and that's normally a woman's job. It's so entrenched in our psyche that women are the ones that actually bring water. So it was something that was quite revealing to us and how ingrained some of our attitudes are. Anyway, so also because of lack of toilets and lack of hygiene, the women are at a risk at violence, gender-based violence while going to remote places to defecate. And there's a very critical need for clean water, access to clean water, especially when women have menstruation and pregnancy. And during the postnatal period, it's very critical for women to have access to good water. Of course, there is a direct link between SDG-5 and SDG-6 and in fact, target SDG-6.2 says access to equitable sanitation and hygiene and women's and girls' needs. It's actually specifically mentioned. Of course, SDG-10 is to reduce inequalities, which is access to clean water and sanitation, brings with it inequalities when you don't have equal access. So at our university, we have a very novel mandate or research at Amrita should be done based on compassion and for the benefit of community. This is a mandate across our university. So we work right now. I close to 150 communities in rural India, spread across the entire length and breadth of India. And one of the main areas that I personally work on is of course women's empowerment, but also directly linked to both water and sanitation. We also have another very large project done by another group within the university that is to provide customized clean drinking water solutions to rural communities. They're targeting 5000 communities. They've already finished over 250 communities. So this is our summary of some of the work that we have done. I would say close to about 50% of the work that we have done actually involves either sanitation or water, but predominantly through a building of skills and capacity in women. So I'll give you a couple of examples. 2018, the state where I'm presently located was impacted by very, very severe flooding. It's a state that has pretty reasonable water resources, but all the water resources were contaminated by really bad flooding landslides. And so at that point of time in the peak, there was no clean drinking water access to many communities. So Israel came to our aid and the constant of Israel provided very normal systems of providing clean drinking water to rural communities. The advantage of the system is that it's very interesting system. It recycles what is used in dialysis filtration. So the filters that are used for dialysis in hospitals are sanitized and they are fitted into this filtration system. So it could be manually used and you can take really dirty water that is completely, which has all kinds of turbidity and all kinds of pathogens and it can go through the system and come out completely potable. So it's a very interesting system to deploy during disaster times. However, it is not so easily maintained during regular time when you all have regular needs and this thing. So it was during the time when it was deployed, it was something that was brought a lot of relief to the communities it served. And this is how our relationship with Professor Hadas from Tel Aviv University started and since it has grown. Another very interesting project that we did with women and sanitation is that we worked across 18 states in 18 villages in India, one from each state. Our target, we started with 21 villages, we came down to 18 and we trained women to be sanitation ambassadors. In that a part of them were trained to actually build toilets for themselves and for others in the village. So we piggybacked onto the Swachh Bharat scheme, which basically the government was giving funds for people to build toilets. But the way we approached it is to first build skills among women who were basically they were agriculture laborers. So they would work in the fields when it was agriculture season and they would be material movers at a construction site when it was not the agriculture season. So instead of being unskilled, lowly paid laborers, they could now learn a skill like masonry, plumbing, plastering, and they could earn wages of a skilled person. But the process they would build their own toilets will also build toilets for others and they would be paid for their work through the Swachh Bharat mission. 18 of these villages, all 18 of them by the time we were done with the project were certified by the government as open verification free, which means over 60% of their community have toilets. Yes. Now I would like to talk to you about the vice project. This is the one that we are doing in collaboration with Professor Hadas. And here our idea was to train women in villages to be water ambassadors. So they learn how to monitor the quality and quantity of water in their villages. So we started this in two places, one in Kerala and one in Karnataka. The project is co-funded by the Consulate of Israel in South India. And we have actually successfully completed training 10 water ambassadors and they have over the last six months collected data and monitored the data at the household level for over 1000 households in the place in the district of Raichur in Karnataka in the place called Gangrampur. And it's very interesting. In this very district, there were at least eight deaths due to water contamination before we started the project. So it's a community based approach to clean drinking water. And the women, what our next step in this is to make sure that we link the women and their role, not just to go and monitor the water, but also link them to the government program, which we have. We have a government program called the Jal Jeevan program, which aims to provide clean drinking water to the doorsteps of women in every household. It is led by the community and it's supposed to be motivated and designed by the community. What is interesting is if the community doesn't actually have awareness of what needs to be done, this is not something that's really going to pan out. What we figured is that we're still doing the research on it, but there are such low levels of awareness of what even clean drinking water means and what people live with and what people's bodies have gotten adjusted to. So it's if this particular scheme of the government to give clean drinking water access to the entire country has to pan out in the best way, it is critical that women are a part of this, but not just in for namesake. They have to be educated. They have to have awareness and they should be able to create that same awareness in the entire community. So we foresee a lot of work in this area. Before this, we see that this particular government scheme can actually realize what it hopes to realize and that is a part of what we're working on. This is the future of the work that we're doing. Before I finish, I would like to say that this year India holds the G20 presidency and our university is a part of the civil civil 20, which brings the voices of civil society to the government and influences the policies that are accepted by the government. As a part of that, I am chairing the group that is working on gender equality and disability, a part of our working groups agenda is also to look into women and water. So if anybody who is listening today is interested in lending their voices, their experience and knowledge into the discussions, the policy discussions on women and water, because it's not just India, it's about all the G20 countries and beyond these decisions and policies that are adopted actually influence so much more. So we would be happy to welcome you to lend your voices to our conversation, bring your knowledge, bring your best practices, use them to inform policy instead of unthought of policy. So again, this is an open invitation. I'll post the links on the chat as soon as I'm done. Again, I would love to invite all of you from all over the world to participate in that conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lavani. And next up we have the pleasure of hearing from Dr. Natalie Who. Dr. Who, assistant professor in civil environmental engineering at the Ohio State University. Dr. Who's research focuses on sustainable water treatment engineering and microbiomes at fundamental and system scale to protect human and environmental health. HALLAB, the water team, conducted fundamental research on UV water treatment to combat microbial threats and system research on the links between water microbiomes and human health. She earned her B.S.M.S. and Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from University of Kentucky and the University of Colorado Boulder. As a post-graduate research, she explored the microbiomes and the toxicity of drinking water and wastewater. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Natalie Who. Thanks so much for the kind introduction and thank you all for joining the webinar today. I'm excited to share with you about some of the more fundamental scale ways that we've been investigating. Ways to overcome some of the challenges that are associated with implementing UV in general, which can definitely be exacerbated in small rural areas. And as the other speakers will point out, this can disproportionately negatively affect women. So just to set the stage for why we're focusing on UV, we know that chlorine is commonly used in many parts of the world for managing microbiological water quality. But there are drawbacks, whether for both achieving an adequate disinfection or whether you do achieve adequate disinfection. If you don't get enough disinfection, you could have taste and odor problems. Biofilms could develop, pathogens can proliferate in your water system. On the other hand, if you do achieve adequate disinfection with chlorine, there still could be some drawbacks. The residual chlorine could be depleted in the distribution system or during storage of water. You have to use chemicals. They cause taste and odor problems. And you have to manage a delicate balance between achieving adequate disinfection while minimizing disinfection byproducts. And so that's why we focus on UV as an alternative or complementary technology. But it also has drawbacks that we're trying to figure out how to overcome. Achieving adequate disinfection with UV has traditionally relied on fragile mercury lamps, which can be toxic if the mercury is released to the environment. Also, UV provides no residual. There's no chemical that stays in the water to keep disinfecting it and keep it safe. And also, UV requires electricity. So these are some of the challenges we've been focusing on. And UV complements chlorine disinfection. So they're not mutually exclusive. They could be used together because in general, the sensitivity of various infectious agents to UV is opposite their sensitivity to chlorine. But what we know about UV from the long history over the past century with mercury lamps is that UV has a proven history of disinfection. So for low pressure mercury lamps that emit a single wavelength at 254 nanometers, there is a lot of literature demonstrating disinfection of different classes of microorganisms and infectious agents across a range of doses. Whenever we look at medium pressure mercury lamps, those emit many more wavelengths across the UV spectrum in addition to other wavelengths across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. But what we see from medium pressure disinfection is that if you look across the same classes of microorganisms and infectious agents, the doses required to achieve the same level of disinfection compared to low pressure mercury lamps are lower. So this indicates that there's some advantage from having multiple wavelengths. If we look at the sensitivity of different pathogens or indicator microorganisms, viruses across the UVC spectrum, we can see that there are regions of this where the dose required to inactivate them are lowest. We can target these local minima where these infectious agents or indicators are most sensitive to UV to design the most optimal systems. And what is exciting nowadays is that there are mercury free UV sources that also allow us to select the wavelengths and start to overcome that first challenge of having to rely on toxic mercury lamps. So some of the mercury free UV sources we've been focusing on in my lab include eczema lamps, krypton chloride eczema lamps and light emitting diodes. And light emitting diodes can have selectable wavelengths based on varying the material composition of the semiconductor. And we typically focus on these three wavelengths here and then the krypton chloride eczema lamp it emits quasi monochromatic radiation at 222 nanometers. And I'm going to share some information on both of these. And what is great is that we are targeting those regions where infectious agents and microbes are most sensitive to UV by selecting these wavelengths. So to look at a case study where we implemented some UV LEDs in the field. First, we investigated the disinfection by our UV LED flow through system. This pearl aqua unit here across a range of flow rates and water qualities by measuring the UV absorbance UVA and as a function of flow rate here and we measured login activation of MS to bacteria phage and indicator virus. And we were able to develop this combined variable model to have a way to predict MS to login activation as a function of all those flow rates and UV absorbance is and we use that baseline model. To monitor the performance of this reactor whenever we installed it in a small rural system in Colorado and whenever you look at this slope of this observed versus predicted MS to an activation. Comparing the slope of a challenge test that we did over the course of the year to that validation that we did at the bench allowed us to assess whether disinfection performance was less than predicted in the white zone or better than predicted in the gray zone. And what we saw was that even though we didn't clean or maintain or do anything with this UV disinfection system. We still maintain performance of disinfection at least as good as when we first installed it and when we validated it at the bench. So that was really exciting because we noticed that throughout the year there were really challenging conditions for UV so this water treatment plant was experiencing turbidity that was leaking out of their slow sand filter. And that can present a challenge for UV disinfection whenever you have high turbidity particles in the water that block UV light from reaching microbes. Also at different times of the year, there were low UV transmittance values, but despite these challenges the UV disinfection was at least as good as what we predicted. And one of my students has been focusing on really high turbidity conditions kind of looking at worst case scenarios where filter upset conditions can most negatively impact small utilities or point of use household scale water systems. And my student Judith, she has been looking at turbidity values that are super high orders of magnitude higher than what you design UV disinfection for. But despite these super challenging conditions measured over the course of the year across a range are using indigenous spores, which are really resistant to an activation. We see predictable measurable UV disinfection, even under these super challenging conditions. Another thing that we noticed from that implementation study of the UV LED system on my PhD student teaching and undergrad Amanda have been working on this is that when we looked at the microbial communities in the biofilm of the tubing coming out of the reactor. We saw that chlorinated water had a different microbiome than the microbiome in the bias coming out of the filter effluent and coming out of the UV LED effluent. So this is telling us that chlorine is causing a shift in the microbial communities. And sure that's interesting but why it's important is because of the shift in microbes that it was pushing towards because the both the chlorine and the UV were treating filter effluent. So what we noticed in the chlorine biofilms was that it was preferentially increasing relative abundance of genera that can contain pathogens and opportunistic pathogens, especially those that can be problematic in rural context. So those are some of the UV LED studies that we've been focusing on and now I want to share some of the Xmer lamp studies that we've been focusing on. One of them, another study by my PhD student Eugene is looking at disinfection of antibiotic resistant bacteria. And whenever comparing the Xmer lamp to traditional low pressure mercury lamp, we saw that the Xmer lamp emitting 222 nanometer disinfected this antibiotic resistant bacillus better than 254 nanometer. What's really exciting is that it also prevented transfer of that horizontal resistance gene to bacillus that were not already resistant. And it did this regardless of whether we exposed the cells in a wholesale matrix or whether we just focused on extracting the DNA and really well controlling the conditions of the experiment. So this is great that certain wavelengths can disinfect antibiotic resistant bacteria and prevent horizontal resistance gene transfer better than traditional UV. Another type of problem that we have focused on that this wavelength can help is destruction of toxins. So harmful algal blooms produce algal toxins such as microcystin LR and undergraduate students on that. She measured the degradation of this microcystin LR by UV 222 and UV 254. And what she saw was that the rate constant for degradation by the Xmer lamp was much higher than for the 254 nanometer lamp. That means it was more effective at degrading the algal toxin. And what's really exciting is that even though these Xmer lamps are still in super early stage, they have barely been optimized. They don't have the development history that low pressure lamps do. Despite all those challenges, it's electrically on par in terms of how much energy it's going to take to achieve this better level of toxin treatment. So this is really exciting that it could be a potential solution in the near future. And not only could it be useful for toxins like this, it could be useful for similarly UV absorbing problematic compounds that cause taste and odor or other types of toxins. And this is across a range of water qualities. And we did some of these analyses in collaboration with USGS. The last UV 222 cheerleading study that I want to share about is that UV 222 reduces E. coli regrowth better than UV 254. And this is despite they achieve similar levels of disinfection on the basis of UV dose. But whenever we expose these samples to light, which activates the photoliase enzyme and cells like E. coli and they're able to repair the DNA damage that is caused by UV. We saw that after low pressure disinfection cells were able to regrow. After 222 nanometer disinfection cells continued to die off. So we didn't see evidence of any or much repair with the 222 nanometer light. So it's really exciting that 222 can also reduce this drawback of UV where you can have regrowth due to photoreactivation. So those are some of the ways we've been focusing on optimizing mercury free UV using specific wavelengths. And made it by really exciting new UV sources for managing microbial water quality. But as I was touching on with that photo repair study, we still have this drawback that there's no residual. And there can be repair and regrowth. But some of the ways that we've been thinking about managing this is to apply UV throughout distribution or throughout where water is used. One of the ways we've been looking at this is investigating ways UV might be applied in point of use devices or at well water or at community taps. Or in municipal systems UV might be applied in transmission mains, storage tanks, large building plumbing, distribution mains or in point of use or point of entry household systems. So we think there are ways that could be, UV could be implemented all throughout these. One of my students, Daniel Ma, PhD candidate, he focused on trying to determine, okay, well, if we're going to do this, how far apart does UV need to be to maintain acceptable risk. And he was looking at the context of rural developing community where people collect water in a package from some centralized form of treatment. And then they transport it or store it before ingestion under conditions that could permit photo repair because of sunlight exposure. And we looked at the risk over different exposure times and we saw that there was this is the opposite of a sweet spot. So there's a time when it becomes most risky before risk starts to decrease because at first risk increases because of photo repair, but eventually solar disinfection takes over. So Dan modeled this across a range of collection times and exposure times, which is really a reflection of how far people had to walk or how long they have to store the water. And we saw that that sweet spot occurred at this pattern of exposure times. But what this can be translated into is really in a rural context determining, okay, how far apart do UV treatment applications need to be spaced so that everyone is in the safe zone, no one is in the risky zone for whenever there might be risk from regrowth before solar disinfection takes over. And thinking about in more centralized contexts or in places where we might have rural communities relying on a water treatment plant. We can think about that we might apply UV at several different stations throughout to maintain risk below that acceptable level. Something we've been thinking about in my lab and that happens in the US is centralization. So there might be communities located within the vicinity of a water treatment plant, but they're not served by it. And so communities consider regionalization or extension of pipes, but having really long pipes presents its own challenges with water pressure and maintaining microbial water quality. And so using this risk based approach, we can figure out, okay, how many UV booster stations would we need to apply to maintain microbial water quality and keep those people safe. And so finally, one way we've been looking at getting over this last barrier that we've identified so that we can apply UV everywhere to keep everyone safe is the requirement for electricity. I've seen other people in the literature relying on human power of pumping a hand pump, turning a dynamo to generate electricity and then power UV light. We've been looking at harnessing power from gravity fed water systems or pressurized water systems to use hydro electricity to power UV, especially LEDs which require very low power. And we've been working on this with some collaborators and mechanical engineering and we're very excited about it. But to summarize, these are the ways that we're trying to overcome these boundaries for implementing UV disinfection. And what we've seen so far is that our UV LED disinfected water one year with low costs and zero maintenance. And we're finding very many promising possibilities for wavelength optimization using non mercury UV sources. And that we can use this risk informed planning and technological advancements to enable implementation of UV throughout water systems or throughout river areas where it's needed most. Thank you. Thank you Natalie. And now we'll proceed to our last speaker that's not least. We have Anna Galdos Balzagari. Anna is a leader of Safe Water in Mexico and Knowledge Management Unit in Canta Azul. Anna's project Safe Water in Mexico aimed to design and implement water treatment solution in developing regions. Anna, she holds a BS Environmental Science and MS in Public Health and she's interested in exploring the human health effects of environmental exposures from all the disciplinary approach. Currently her work is focused on creating knowledge that contributes to solution that guarantee the human right to access water in Google communities. Please join me in giving one welcome to Anna. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity that I am having some technical problems with the videos. So, well, sorry, I think that you cannot see me. Well, I'm very grateful to be able to share with you our experience. So thank you for this opportunity. I'm going to present some of the results of the Safe Water project, which is a transdisciplinary project led by the Ulster University. The consortium includes the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, the University of Medellin, and Antioquia Science and Technology Center in Colombia. In Mexico, the work done was led by Canta Azul and this is the experience that I'm going to share with you today. Next one, please. Household Water Treatment and Safe Storage provides a solution that for many contexts remain the only medium term alternative. Many different technologies exist, are widely used, and there is evidence of their positive impact. But they also present several important challenges. Most of the systems are designed to treat and store around 20 liters per day. So their use is reduced to drinking water and few other domestic uses. And in context where there is no pipe water to supply water to the household, it is very common to find multiple and different types of containers in the households to store water. Since not all the water in the household is treated to the exposure and the consumption of unsafe water remains a common practice and limits the effectiveness of most technologies. Guaranteeing water quality is another common challenge as water must be stored after treatment. It is very common to observe water recontamination due to the lack of the necessary hygiene conditions to keep the water safely stored. And these systems also represent a significant burden for the end users in terms of operation and maintenance. It is a burden that is added to the multiple tasks that they already had to carry out on a daily basis. So to address these challenges, it is important also to understand that in the rural areas gender roles divisions for water management are very common. While Maine are usually responsible for water management at the community scale, women are the ones who manage water at the household level. They are responsible for ensuring enough water every day for all the needs of the family. And that means that they have to transport the water to the household. They have to store and distribute it within the household. They have to make sure that it lasts for the whole day and that for that they have to make our smart use of it. And they also have to treat it and keep it safe. Next, please. At Cantal Azul, we have been working for 10 years in a region that is called Los Altos in Chiapas, the southeast of Mexico. This is a rural indigenous region and one of the most marginal size in Mexico. After having worked with around 100 communities and knowing their needs and challenges, we designed a system with three main purposes. To increase treated water availability in the household to fulfill the human right to water. To provide access to treated water at key points in the household to simplify exclusive use of treated water. And to avoid water storage after treatment to reduce the risk of recontamination. So the concept was to have a household level system that provides safe running tap water. Next one. So the safe water system consists on a point of entry water treatment unit that includes a row water container located in the bottom level of the support structure. And another container for treated water at the top level. The bottom container can receive water from multiple sources. Then the water is pumped from this container through the treatment components and into the top container for safe storage. The treatment processes consists on three filters and a UV disinfection chamber. And the key element of the safe water system is that it uses gravity to distribute water from the top container through pipes to taps installing places in the household where people carry out practices where water is used. We installed taps at least at two points in all the households at the kitchen and at the hygiene setting. Next one. The intervention also included the delivery of the results of the water quality tests in each family. So they could have a feedback on the impact of the system. We gave them a report like the one that you can see here in the photo and we explained the results to them with the results of before and after the installation of the system. Next one. We used a state which randomized trial to design to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention with a sample of 187 households. For those of you who are not familiar with this type of design, I will explain it briefly. You can look at the graph to understand it better. A baseline which will be time zero on the X axis. All households started in the control group and in random sequences crossed over to the intervention group during one of the seven past baseline steps. So in the last set, all the households were in the intervention group. And in this way, all the households in the study were part of both groups at different times. Post baseline steps lasted two months each, more or less, and the total follow up period of the study was 15 months. All the follow up pieces were conducted in all the study households to measure the outcomes to each step. Next one, please. So now I will explain a little more about the methodology. We use the design that I had just explained to assess the impact in a quantitative approach. We also use another methodology to obtain qualitative results. And today I would like to share with you some results obtained through both approaches for the quantitative results. Well, they were obtained through eight household visits in which we collected water quality data and also information through interviews and structure observations. The main results that I will share today are indicators of water quality and behaviors related to water. And for qualitative results, we conducted four focus groups with women, six individual interviews to women also. And we also held reflection sessions with the field team to collect testimonies that they heard from during household visits. Today, I will share the results obtained to these questions that we asked to ourselves. That is, what are the aspects that women name when expressing the changes they perceive after the intervention. Next one, please. So the first results that I will present are those of the quality of the word that the families reported having drank recently. The respondents were asked to identify the container from which they mostly, they most recently drank. And I would like to show you first this photo of some of the points where we took water samples. The second photo being from the top left, you can see one of the top of the systems, but the rest are the typical containers where drinking water is stored. Next one, please. So this graph shows the percentage of households with contaminated drinking water by step and by group. The first thing that I would like to highlight is that the percentage of households with contaminated water in the control period is very high. So we can understand the conditions in which this population lives. In the baseline, 80% of households had E. coli in their drinking water containers. During step one, the percent of households in intervention with E. coli dropped to 37% and remain lower than control households throughout the study, despite seasonal variation. So we observe a significant improvement in the quality of drinking water. In intervention periods, 32% of households had E. coli compared with 85% of during control periods. Next one, please. In relation to behaviors associated with water, I would like to highlight three results. One that the most households discontinued the practice of storing water in multiple containers after the installation of the system. The other one is that we observe a change in the habit of drinking drinking water as it increased from 42% during the control period to 89% during the intervention period. And that only 9.5% of respondents in intervention period with access to disinfected water reported drinking from a point of access or a container different than the top of the system. These results show that the system has contributed to reduce water stretch and facilitate safe water consumption. Next one, please. For the qualitative results, we divide the women's responses into four categories. Those that make life easier, those that have to do with mental health, with physical health or security. And we understand that all of these categories somehow contribute to improving the quality of life. And some of these women literally mentioned that they were noticing a change in their way of life. Next one, please. So for the category of life is easier, women say things like that they don't have to boil water anymore. Or that they fetch less water and wood that they don't have to walk long long distances that the water is in every household that the water is closed by even inside the house. But it's easier to serve the water. It's easier to store the water. So and this was one of our purposes to facilitate water management for women within the home. So these results confirmed that the intervention was able to respond to the needs of making life easier for women. Next one, please. For physical health, women spoke about the health of children and adults. They perceived a reduction in gastrointestinal illnesses. But they also talked about benefits in pain associated with fetching and distributing water, such as back, neck and body pain. Next one, please. The women said they feel calmer now for different reasons. They talked about how they no longer have to worry about fetching water and that gives them peace of mind, especially to those who suffer from some pain. They also feel more relaxed knowing that the water is safe. And they also comment that it calms them to know that their children do not suffer so much. Women also have the burden of caring for the entire family, especially children. So we understand that this change in their lives has brought them calm. Next one, please. And the security category, in this category, we included all the comments that spoke about situations that place them in a position of vulnerability. And they even named how they used to fight over water in the community before the intervention. In this community, the water is so scarce that there are families who will spend the whole night waiting for the water to sprout again, and they used to come to fight. They also comment that they feel safer because of the quality of the water. Next one, please. And I would like to end my presentation with two ideas that, in my opinion, are useful for any context. One is that solutions might be designed to make life easier. Households that require a home scale system often have to deal with many other tasks and water management, especially treatment and safe storage, are not always a priority. So the technology must be chosen once we understand the needs of the context, and we must always work together with the population that will receive the technology that in most cases are women. So it is necessary to include them from the beginning, from the designing phase. And the other one is that it has to do with the understanding that the biggest challenge is to making, it's making access to save water as a sustainable outcome. For this, we must not forget to include a strategy for the maintenance of the systems while designing the intervention. The save water project included a strategy for maintenance during and after the intervention. Today, I have not talked about it, but I wanted to highlight it here because it is always the biggest challenge, and we should allocate resources and effort to find creative ways to achieve this. And for ending, I would like to share a two-minute video so you can understand better the context and hear some testimonies. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Chane. It's always good to hear about Kanta Azul project. That concludes our speaker section for today. Thank you for all the speakers for the insightful and mind-opening talks. Before we move to the panel discussion, moderating our panel today, we have Rachel Gehr. Rachel earned her BS in civil engineering and MS in environmental engineering, and she currently pursuing her PH in engineering education at Purdue University. Rachel's previous research has focused on PFAS remediation, photochemistry, disinfection and water supply in developing countries. The current work which the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship funds focus on quality assessment at the college level. Thanks, Anna. We're going to go ahead and move to the panel discussion portion of our presentation. So there are quite a few questions in the Q&A, and we're going to answer those in just a minute, so feel free to keep submitting. We're going to start with a directed question for each of our speakers. So we'll start with Anna. Thinking about the project, what kinds of concerns or resistances did you observe in the communities about implementing water treatment systems at both the household and community scale? Well, in this particular region, it is very important to know that the communities have local authorities that provide their services for free and that each family must also participate and cooperate to be part of the community and be able to count on the services and benefits provided by the community organization. So in communities where there are conflicts and families are divided, it can be difficult to install a community-scale water treatment system, for example. It is also a region that has been benefited by governmental and no governmental projects and programs, and we have observed a certain lack of confidence that the system can offer them a real solution. We have also seen some resistance to the use of chlorine for water disinfection, especially because the chlorine used in disinfection is not here, is not normally adequate for water treatment, and it also is not very controlled, and they have bad experiences with the taste and the smell. And while communities suffer more due to the lack of availability of water and quality is not the highest priority, so they tend to be very willing to receive solutions to increase the availability of water, and they are generally in agreement with improving the quality. Thank you. Yeah, I'm sure a massive change is difficult for a lot of reasons to adapt. I'm glad that we're seeing a positive start to that. Bavani, a question for you. What has been the trend of women empowerment over time? What direction do you see it going, specifically looking at the responsibility of collecting water falling to women? It's an interesting question, right? So I mean, as I think as the scheme rolls out successfully, you'll find far fewer women going to collect water. Whether it's a question of empowerment, definitely it would save them some time, but what we see is two different things. When you are disconnected from a resource, your understanding of that resource goes down. So a woman in an urban setting has really no good sense of water tables, how much water they're consuming. Well, they pay for the water, but that's about the only measure, but not what is really, how it's really impacting the water for the entire community, not like when you see a bell or a pond or a lake or a river. And so that disconnect between natural resources and women in some sense to me is also disempowering. So while you empower an individual woman in terms of her time poverty, her effort, her health, there is a larger price we may be paying as humanity as a whole. So we need to figure out a way where our understanding and our connection with natural resources stays despite technology and despite convenience. And this would be my answer. I hope that kind of answers what question you had in mind. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for that insight. And Natalie asking a somewhat similar question here, what has been the trend in community scale versus decentralized water treatment over time? And what direction do you see that trend moving forward? Is that all also addressed to me? This one is addressed to Natalie. Yeah, but if you want to follow up whenever I'm down, feel free to jump in here. So at least in the United States where I've done my work primarily and what I'm observing with rural water systems, and this is coming from the top down from the government, there's been a push toward encouraging communities to pull resources work together and either regionalize or centralized systems. And so regionalizing they pull together like human resources and training and money. But then that that has some geopolitical problems, but then the extensions like we were showing with extending the pipe to a nearby community to serve one that maybe had been on a private well or something like that. It has its own problems with it because the longer the pipe the harder it is to maintain the water pressure and the water quality. So kind of looking at the cost benefits of those trade offs while serving them previously answered populations, but doing it in a responsible and sustainable way is difficult. So, yeah, that's what I've been observing in the US is pushing toward that. And so we need to make sure that we have the technologies in place to be able to push that direction while still keeping people safe. Yeah, great. Thank you. And then a general question for kind of all three of you to answer. And maybe we'll start with the body first. But what is the next step moving forward for your team and your project what are the upcoming steps look like for the project advice I think it's very important for us to prove the connections between sanitation and water so there are there are many households that have access to clean drinking water and yet the water at the household level is contaminated so there's something that's going on and we feel that's very strong they link to the sanitation practices and for us to to actually to be able to figure out if that's what it is that is going on I think that's the most important part. At the same time, really work very hard towards behavioral change in those communities. That would be the hardest. Yeah, the behavior changes certainly a difficult part of that. Natalie, do you want to go ahead and answer next. Yeah, so mine is more from a technology technological standpoint so UV LED technology has recently undergone a lot of development there are a lot of players in the field, putting out new types of devices at different scale but what I would really like to see is whether it's possible to implement a bull eczema lamp technology or one day UV LEDs might be able to be available at that low wavelength but I think the benefits are too great to justify waiting on LEDs so I think we need to move forward with something that's build implementable for eczema lamps to help solve some of these problems so that's what I would like to see and be able to actually do some field translation studies and get at some of these problems that people have been bringing up in the Q&A about challenges of implementing really low wavelength UV for challenging water quality conditions. That will be really interesting to learn more about thank you and do you want to answer as well. Yeah well for this project in particular we want to focus more on the maintenance that I was talking about because we as I was saying we build a strategy we train and we hire for people in the community as community technicians and they install the systems they did follow up visits and maintenance during the project but they are still working in the community with this role so we're following up with this strategy and trying to understand how can we keep supporting these well the needs that the community may have and learn from this experience because as I was saying this is the biggest challenge. Yeah great thank you we have a question here in the chat I think Natalie might be helpful for you to answer this one. The question is do you think application of UV in these communities is a technology problem or a cost implementation problem so maybe from your perspective what that difference is between technology or cost. Yeah again I'm going to bring a US perspective here that's where I have most of my experience so in the US I think it is a it's a I can't remember how they worded it but it's a human problem because in the United States for municipal water systems we are required to have chlorine. So this whole idea we have of having distributed UV booster stations there are large pipes small pipes at the point of use to maintain that microbial water quality. There's this huge barrier that we're always going to have to use chlorine, even if we don't need it to maintain the microbial water quality if we have an adequate UV disinfection. So that part is a huge human and social barrier, but I would think from a more rural context that it might be a little bit of both. A lot of these UV technologies even the smaller scale ones they do seem like they're still cost prohibitive I think the needle is moving in the right direction, but hopefully some of these technologies like the combined hydropower LED system. So that you're not having to like put in more infrastructure like a solar panel or other types of electricity generation. We think that that might help move the needle in the right direction. Thank you. And we have kind of two questions here for your presentation one is what is the water source that you're using for your system. And then the next part of that would be if you could talk a bit about the maintenance of the system so how regularly do people need to check on it and how often do parts need to be replaced. Well, they use multiple sources. Most of the households during the rainy season they use rain water. But well, I guess that the question they were also asking if they were using groundwater. No, it's not the case. They generally use spring sources as social springs and rain water, but they can use and mix different water from different sources. That was the purpose of the of the design also because that's the reality. During the implementation and evaluation, we did seven follow up visits just to see how the systems were performing. But we just did a maintenance in two scenarios. One, if there were any failure that can put any health risk in the household, or if they asked for maintenance, we didn't. We didn't did any maintenance just because we saw the need, but people had to ask for it because we were also trying to promote like these maintenance strategy. And for that, the families, they need to see that need. And right now, they are responding to that need when families report a failure or something that the system needs to maintain. They go and do these maintenance. It depends a lot on the household. They we just asked to the families to do some cleaning to the row water tank, but not to the top and that has this treated water. So, yeah, I don't know if I answer it. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. We have, let's see, about four minutes left for the panel discussion here. So just one final question for all three of you to answer. How can organizations such as the IUBA and IWA contribute to and support this movement of empowering water and promoting safe water access. And then on top of that, how can our webinar participants also help with this movement? So Bavani, do you want to answer first? Like I mentioned before, it would be wonderful if people who are representing organizations that work on what the problems lend their voices to shape policy. This is a very powerful way to actually shift things that are much larger in the global scale and that would be one way. But for researchers who are working, try not to stay in your labs only, but try to actually go to the field, spend some time with people who are having problems because when you're designing technology, it tends to work in one place in one context and always will fail in another context. So the more understanding you have of the problems there are, the better your solutions design would be. And yeah, as much as possible, build capacity in the people that you're working with so that there's no dependence on you, either for technology or anything. Thank you. And do you want to go ahead? Yeah, well, I agree with everything you said. I mean, I think that it's very, very important that we learn from each other and then we start having like a more transdisciplinary mind, a way of thinking. And that means that we need to learn from different disciplines and also different stakeholders because the challenges that are very, very big. And yeah, sometimes we focus just in one discipline and we don't understand that the reality is really complex. So I think that these kind of webinars are very important to understand that the technology interacts with people so we need to understand what people need. We understand what people, what kind of ideas they already have, how are they organizing and try to work together. Thank you so much. And Natalie, do you want to close this out with your answer? Yeah, I would just add and kind of thumbs up both of these things that were said as a person who's lab or we do tend to stay more in our lab under our nice tightly controlled conditions. We do love being able to interact with others and go into the field but we have noticed that it's sometimes can be hard to do that to like break into it. And so I think organizations like IWA are great at bringing people together so that you can learn who the players are that you need to talk to and develop relationships so that you can get introduced to people and learn what the problems are, not just secondhand from the people that are actually working in the communities but actually starting to build those relationships and going to the communities. So I think that's where organizations like IWA can really help and IUBA. All right, thank you so much to all three of you. It's great to hear stories both in the communities to also hear the technical research side of how we can continue making progress in advancing these technologies. I'm going to go ahead and pass it back to Hadas and Donna to close us out. Yeah, thank you so much. I want to extend a big thank you to all the speakers for the moderator, Rachel. And before we end, I want to share with you with you all final thoughts. And now the screen goes to jump in here. And we want to learn about the future, what we can, which webinar and which topics would you interest the most. So it would love if you will help us to learn that. In a few seconds, we will share the results and we would love that you will keep it posted regarding our next webinars and what we are planning for the future. Can we share the results? Okay, interesting. So I think that we know what we want to do, which webinar we will do next. So please, Hadas. Thank you very much, Donna. So first of all, I'd like to thank the International Water Association for supporting the IUBA in this joint webinar. And our focus was actually to combine different disciplines, also from the academics, but also from people that, the women that work in the field and implementation and also in women empowerment. Can you share the next slide, please? In addition to that, we would, the IWA would like to invite you to two new exciting webinars. One of them would be on insights and innovation for advanced water treatment. And another webinar would be on standard action, understanding urban sanitation regulation and challenges. So please join these webinars should be amazing. Next slide, please. In addition to that, those that join will get a discount from the IWA. We would also like you to invite joining also the IUBA, which is the International Water Validation Association. And I'd like to take a few minutes to summarize the webinar. First, we need to understand what is water insecurity? So water insecurity is the inability to access and benefit from affordable, adequate and reliable safe water. And the term affordable is very important when we talk about low-middle income settings. This is something that we really must also emphasize. In addition to that, what is well-being, especially for women? Well, well-being is the extent to which people feel extreme positive emotion and the feeling of happiness. And it was actually proven in many studies that the access to safe water improves the emotional state of women and their well-being. So therefore, gender equality and women and water are two very important things that come together. Now, looking at, for example, at the SDGs, clean water relates to SDGs, both 5, 6 and 10. And women in general feel responsible not only for fetching water, but also for having water that is safe. UV actually can play a huge role in providing safe water, especially in the centralized role areas. However, as we said before, UV disinfection is not widely implemented. And therefore we looked at various cases and tried to analyze them to understand what are the challenges, what are the gaps in what are the opportunities in the future to use UV disinfection in various rural areas. It could be also in schools. It could be connected to solar panels that are anyway in the field or in schools. It could be in healthcare facilities. Also, in addition to that, UV does not change the taste of water. And in many cases, water tastes as a sensitive issue. In addition to that, we must look at various things that are required. All the UV does not require addition of chemicals. There isn't energy demand. So we need to see what are the energy sources. Is it solar? Is it hydropower? Is it connected to the grid? In addition to that, for example, we need to look at adoption of technology. So there is a social trust and a social barrier in adoption of technologies. This is something that we also must look. In addition to that, water financing. So how are we financing these systems? Is it by donors? Is it by NGO? Is it by corporate social responsibilities? Is it by government? And we also need to look at regulation and politics. So all these things come together when we think about UV systems and the way which UV systems are implemented. In addition to that, one thing that we noticed in our research is that when we train women to be the water ambassadors to actually measure and analyze their water quality, this is also something that we saw that is very empowering because then women have the control over not only the quality of the water but also the quantity. Unfortunately, and I would like to end by this, there is an issue of climate change. And those that pay the price for climate change are mostly people that are low-middle income settings. And one of the most painful things is that those that pay the price have less money. And it results in flooding, the flooding results in water contamination, the flooding results in addition of microbial contamination to the water. It results in sickness and it results in many, many negative phenomenon which impact the safety of the water. And therefore this is something that also must address and look how can we actually mitigate climate change, flooding, droughts in all these cases, especially in these low income settings. So this is something that is very important to look at. And use of this infection can serve as an alternative. It can serve as a treatment technology that can be used in various cases as we said before in schools and household level, in the community level, in hospitals. But of course, there's important to use the technology correct. And the only way for us to make an impact and make a change is to work with organizations like AMLITA and Cantor Azul and other organizations. And we welcome all of you to join also the IWA and also the IUVA and to work with us to make this change. And thank you very much. And I think that's it. So thank you in all the languages in the world. And we're one global community.