 Good day to all of you. Very welcome to the session. My name is Nadine Asander. I'm the policy officer of the Water and Development Partnership Program, and I am the master of ceremony for this session. We just had a very interesting and fruitful first session, and we look very much forward to the upcoming presentations and the discussions. I have some housekeeping rules here for you. You can use the chat during the presentation to express yourself and share insights. However, if you have questions for the speakers, please place them in the Q&A, mentioning the name of the speaker. You can find this Q&A in the toolbar in the below in your window. Also, a request to the panelists, to the presenters that you can also access this Q&A, and then you can already answer some of the questions that you find relevant to answer. After the presentations are over, we will reuse the remaining time for discussion. During this period, you can also raise the hands. They might give you the mic. Depends a little bit on how the flow goes. And please also for the speakers, if you are speaking, turn on your camera. And a note is that this presentation will be recorded, and we will also share the recordings with the attendees after the symposium has ended. Then I'm going to introduce the moderator of this session, Technology for Impact. The moderator of this session is Professor Graham Eewitt. He's Professor, hydrologist at IC Delft Institute for Water Education since 2019. Yes, Graham, I see you are here with your camera on. Prior to this, he was the director of the Center for Water Resources Research at UMGNI. I hope I pronounced it correctly. Water Chair of Water Resources Research at the University of KwaZulu, Natal in South Africa. His recent work has been focused on the effective use of science to better inform land and water resources policy development, especially in developing countries and developing tools to support the effective implementation of peace. Graham, can I give you the mic? Thanks, Nadine, for the introduction. Yes, I think you should be able to hear me now. Well, good, I hope, right? Good afternoon, everyone, if it is good afternoon for you. Very nice to see so many people joining this interesting session. Nadine, introduce me. My name is Graham Eewitt. I also just want to introduce our rapporteur, Faryana Rashid, who has already typed in the chat. I don't know if you want to show us your face, Faryana, so we can actually recognize you because you will also have a short feedback session at the end of the day. The session, I think, is a very interesting one, Technology for Impact. And, well, let's think about that a bit. There are lots and lots of technology solutions, of course, but they can be inclusive or they can be exclusive. There are many issues associated with technology around access, cost, technical capacity to engage with them. And today we have three very interesting speakers and three different topics where we will learn a little bit more about effective technology for impact. So that certainly is the challenge for the three speakers that we have. Let me introduce the speakers very briefly because they will soon be taking over. First, we have Marlouce Moll from IHE Delft. Marlouce is the Associate Professor of Water Resources Management here, and she's focusing at the moment on work related to water accounting and water productivity. And there's a very strong team that she leads working in that. I see Marlouce is the only one with the camera on, so I think it's probably better that I don't introduce all three speakers right now. I'll introduce the others just before their presentations. So I think let me hand over to Marlouce for her presentation and just remember those rules and suggestions that Nadine posed that please use the Q&A and be quite specific about who the question you are asking is for, and the panelists can then respond to those. So Marlouce, over to you. Thank you, Graeme, and you can see my screen. I can see your screen very clearly and I can hear you well. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for the introduction and great to be here. It's a very interesting symposium and also an interesting topic about technology for impact. And today I want to talk a little bit about this project that we've been implementing over the last five or so years that is called Water Productivity Improvement... Productivity Improvement... No, what was it? Water Productivity Improving... No, I don't remember what the title is. Anyway, I'll come up with it. So it's Water Pip Project and I would like to talk a little bit about the previous phases on what we've done so far on technology for impact and what the way forward is. So we recently started a next phase of the project and we're really looking into extending our knowledge and our experience of the first two phases. So what were these different phases about? So we started in 2018 with the first phase where we were advised by the Dutch government to develop guidance on Water Productivity Improving... Water Productivity Concepts and to support this objective of improving Water Productivity Improvement in practice. That was the abbreviation. In the agricultural sector, using the vapor database. So it's a new data product based on remote sensing data and can we use that to inform decision-making on improving Water Productivity? And in the first phase, we really tested more the vapor data and how we could actually utilize that data for agricultural applications. So it's really focused on developing these applications using the remote sensing data. And based on that, so with a lot of testing, a lot of validation of the data, we developed protocols for vapor analysis, diagnostics, what is causing vapor water productivity variations and also providing a compendium on identifying solutions for improving water productivity. In the second phase, we started also sharing our knowledge and our skills and our developed protocols by developing training of trainers. And we started in three different countries. We identified centers and knowledge hubs where we engage with and we identified local expertise and we trained them in using the tools that we had developed. And we also developed an online course with a lot of the information that we had developed. And this year we started an extension to those two projects and that's on a knowledge action network. So we're really consolidating the materials that we developed and developing with more partners locally in the countries and utilizing this data and also trying to make sure that whatever we develop really reaches the audience and develops the, and really addresses the challenges that people are facing on the ground. And we also try to combine local knowledge, local data together with the remote sensing images and I'll explain a little bit later on why we focused on also local data. So these are the three different steps that we developed. So we had all kinds of tools developed and script and technical analysis using the vapor data to actually map out what productivity variations irrigation performance assessment using this remote data, remote sensing data. And we developed all these standardized protocols and how to systematically do those analysis. So it's a scan on identifying what is where and how are the performance variations. We also developed different methodologies on how to identify what's causing some of these variations and that we identified we could do field surveys, we could apply other remote sensing data to see if the variation we're caused could be identified through other remote sensing data products and also aquacrop modeling. So very high modeling in the fields but we can only do one field at a time where as remote sensing data we can actually do a scan across the field in one go. And we also developed a document and a tool that had a lot of intervention that could actually address some of these low water productivity identified areas and see what is causing it and how can we address this. So this is one of the examples and the case studies that we developed with partners in Kenya, so the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture was one of our partners and they identified center pivot irrigation system in the Tana River Basin where they were growing wheat and they were interested in doing vapor analysis in this particular area. So here you see already some analysis that were done. So we identified the amount of water consumed in the different center pivots and you already see that there's quite some variations in the water consumption in the center pivots. We also see that the similar variation was there in the crop yields. So you could actually think about what is causing low water productivity in some of these areas and of course also what productivity could be assessed. So the idea was really to find out, are there opportunities also to save water, to improve the water yields in these particular areas? So we engaged with the local irrigation manager to see, is some of this information on the remote sensing data, is it of interest and could he utilize it to improve his water management in the system? So in addition to the remote sensing, they also installed a number of soil moisture sensors and they tested in the season 2022 and 2023 and they trained the scheme stuff in the irrigation scheme and actually as a result of that, they realized they were over irrigating the center pivots and they went from daily irrigation to only irrigating three to four days and they reduced the amount of water that they applied without an impact on the production. So you could already see that a lot of this information could really help reducing the water application and therefore also for instance pumping costs, et cetera. So this is some of an example of what we've done with the tools and we applied it in a case study in Kenya. What we did realize that this remote sensing data was not applicable for all kinds of applications. So it provides a lot of relevant information to support agriculture water management but also the resolution. So a pixel could be 250 meter by 250 meter. That's relevant maybe for large-scale irrigation scheme but maybe not for small-scale farmers. So we found that a lot of the success of the vapor applications were in large-scale monoculture, monocrop culture irrigation schemes. But we also realized to really understand the analysis we need to have an understanding from what's happening on the ground and have field observations and understanding of crop seasons, crop types, et cetera. And we also needed to be much better integrated on what's happening on the ground, what are the needs to make these applications relevant which we tried out with this large irrigation scheme in Kenya. So in the current phase, we're much more focusing towards the marginalized communities and finding how can we utilize some of these remote sensing, this valuable information, also for communities that are marginalized. So these are some of the steps that we are planning to sort of predict the starting that we're planning to start up. So we wanna first see who are these marginalized farmers. So we're working with our new partners in identifying and co-creating what are the criteria for identifying and marginalized farmers and that is all kinds of combination of social and economic indicators. And we want to have project-level indicators that across the project are the same and we wanna have a local indicator. So on each side there are specific indicators that are relevant. We also wanna, based on that after we've identified them, we wanna see what level of technology use and applications do they have and we wanna see what kind of specific needs of data do they have from what related data in addition to what we could get from remote sensing. Then we identify some plots where we wanna do some experiments and we develop these above-based tools with the assessment that we've done. So this is a general overview of the type of analysis that we wanna do. So we wanna have an iterative cycle of engaging with the communities, developing applications and then continuing developing the applications, testing and we continue doing until the communities are finding the tools that we develop relevant and they wanna take up these applications that we've developed, the combination of digital tools remote sensing analysis. So that is what we're planning to do. So there's a lot of things that we still want to do and we wanna really take the data, remote sensing data really to the ground and we wanna really investigate how can we utilize both remote sensing data and the local data to make relevant applications that are relevant for these marginalized farmers. So you can see more on our website where you can find all the information about what we've done in the first phases and of course we'll be updating it with the new phase outputs and what we're starting up soon. Thank you. Thank you, Marluse. So I see there are just looking at the Q&A. There are two questions which we can address while we do the changeover and the first one I don't think is relevant to your question but your presentation, the first one is how much water is needed, is irrigated in one hectare per day? That's a bit of a general question so perhaps you can give a general answer about how you assess that. Yeah, so how much is needed of course has got to do with the type of crop that is in the field and I don't think about it as number of, how much water per hectare but I'm thinking about the water depth. So we have a crop like maize, you've got 600 millimeters per season, you've got a crop like sugarcane that grows the whole year and it's very intensive crop that uses more than a thousand millimeters over a season. So it's really crop dependent and then we need to think about how much they're actually using. So how we estimate the actual water consumption is using these products of the actual evapotranspiration products that Waipo is providing. And then of course we also do a comparison of what was the crop expecting to grow optimally and how much was it getting so we can also get an estimate of is there a reduction in yield due to water stress conditions? Okay, and then the second question which I think is quite an interesting one. Did the farmers running the scheme participate in the remote sensing and what is the plan to engage in further in the next phase? And while we doing that I think we can start sharing the presentation of the next speaker. Yeah, so actually the area that we were engaging with is an irrigation scheme that's managed. So it's not small, the farmers that are partitioned or that's part and partial of the irrigation scheme. We actually have a management body that manages the irrigation scheme. So we were engaging with the farm operators, the farm managers and the farm, yeah, the people that are running the farm but they're not like individual farmers that are responsible for a field. So we're actually with the water pit project we're not continuing at this scale because we're focusing much more in the marginalized communities but with the original Waipo project we're actually engaging with the National Irrigation Authority. So that was the organization that was managing this irrigation scheme and we're continuing doing these analysis with them and not only about on this irrigation scheme but we're also scaling it out on the other irrigation schemes that they're managing. Okay, well, thank you, Marlos. I think you have to stop sharing for the next person to start sharing. So... I just did. Okay, great. All right, so before I introduce the next speaker I see that Faryana has joined us. Faryana you just want to quickly say hello to everyone now that you are video and audible capable. Yeah, am I audible? Yep, you can hear you. Thank you. Good, all right. Nice to have you join us now. There are a number of questions in the Q&A which Marlos, you can respond to directly while we have our next presentation. And that presenter is Violet Maturu who is from the Millennium Community Development Initiative in Kenya. Violet is the executive director and co-founder of the MCDI as the Millennium Community Development Initiative are called. And she's also an independent consultant and monitoring and evaluation, natural resources management and gender and social inclusion. Violet, warm welcome to you. We look forward to your presentation and maybe just one thing to note is that because this is being translated the translators need to be able to keep up with you. So it helps if you slow down a bit. Of course, I don't know what your normal presentation style is but I'm sure it will be suitable. So over to you Violet. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. So let me just get my stop clock starting. Okay, so yeah, so I'm going to present on an upcoming project which is called Remote Sensing for Basin Scale and Local Community Driven Applications from Water Accounting Class to Kuala Lumpur. So this project has a partner of IHE Delft our community-based organization called MCDI, the Professor Wangare Mada Institute of the University of Nairobi in the Wildlife Research and Training Institute in Kenya. And PANI.F is an organization in India and then our long-term partners both ends in the Netherlands. So a very quick context setting. So when you look at Kenya, this project will be in Kenya. So Kenya is a country that's the area, 522,000 kilometers squared compared to Netherlands, you can see it's a moderately large country but not too large. We have a population of 40 million and 80% of the country is arid and semi-arid and the longest river is the Tana River which you can see. And the second longest river is the Athe River and these two rivers are affected by the capital city of Nairobi where 95% of the water that is used in the city is done by inter-basin transfer from the Tana River and then we in the city pollute it and dump it into the Athe River. So the city essentially destroys two water shems. So the Athe River community network is we formed this as people who live along the Athe River just as people are concerned and we see ourselves as both the problem and the solution. So we collaborate among ourselves and we focus on especially bringing together water resource users associations. These are legally recognized by government under the Water Act and we network the different ruas as we call them. We share information, we share opportunities, we share challenges even right now in the symposium. Two of my colleagues are there. One is in the middle section, McQuinney, Halinishi Yusuf and where they have a big problem with sand river harvesting. Then we also have Violet who comes from the upstream of the basin. So today I'm going to use the case of upstream in this region called the Fadi where the Fadi Ruwa is located. And the case that I'm going to use is Larry Swamp. The Larry Swamp and the Roy Road Dam they are like a microcosm of the challenges that face the Athe River along the basin and also other basins. So Larry Swamp, you see this, it looks like grassland but it's actually a swamp. So there's lots of water underground. It's about 600 acres and it is under immense pressure. The swamp supplies the Roy Road River and the Roy Road Dam. So the second picture is of the Roy Road Dam that was, it was constructed before Kenya got independence in the 1950s specifically to supply water to the European settlers in the city of Nairobi. It basically bypasses everybody as that water is piped to Nairobi. There is a proposed second dam along the same river which is the Roy Road to Dam and it's going to be financed by the Deutsche Bank. It has hit some snags with the contracting. The tender has right now been canceled but it raises a lot of issues. The swamp also has a lot of social issues, even historical issues like the Larry Massacre which occurred where the communities now have a very negative view about the swamp and try to, they try to dry it up by pushing soil so that they can grow crops. So the swamp is under a lot of pressure and yet very little is known about the swamp's hydrology. The volumes of water that are being obstructed, whether that is at a sustainable level. So the need for scientific data is very critical, especially now the government has recognized it. The Larry Swamp has an important ground water storage area but there is very little limited scientific information about the swamp and the rivers it supplies downstream. So the question I was asked to address was, how can remote sensing experts make maps useful for communities? Looking, using that Larry Swamp as an example, we would really need as communities maps that seek to inform especially about the hydrology. A lot of these swamps in our country, people don't understand how much water do they hold? How deep are they? What are they supplied? Which rivers, subterranean or otherwise are supplying these swamps with water? And how much water is leaving the swamp? How much is being obstructed? Those kinds of things. Then also, how people are connected among themselves? You've seen our very simple map but that map is so good at getting people to understand how they are interconnected. So if you live downstream of me and I know you by name, my actions tend to be influenced by the fact that I know that when I do something, it will have a negative effect on you because I know you as Graham or Mutuko downstream. So that kind of interconnection, those kinds of maps can really help, especially for advocacy for the conservation of critical water resources. Maps should also inspire. They should show the effects of protection, restoration, like before and after maps. They should also alarm. Like for example, the second dam that is planned along this same river, there are people who are saying that the second dam will essentially drain the first dam. So having that kind of knowledge scientifically proven shown that this is going to be the effect can really help even in the advocacy. Instead of creating the second dam, then it's a mess. As has happened with another dam that was constructed in Kenya, still in the acid basin that was designed for drinking water. And yet it was found that the waters are highly polluted, that right now the government is in a state of flux wondering what to do with this dam that's being completed, but the water cannot be used for its intended purpose. So with regards to data, there's need to involve communities in defining not just the problems, but also the solutions and you can use maps to vision futures. So how remote sensing can ensure, how this project will ensure that collaboration of communities in technology use is by the use of citizen science and making research very interactive, having joint learning and then involving communities in setting the research agenda. So we also need to demystify technology and we need to work with local experts and they are there so that they can be part, part and parcel of understanding how they can study and understand these water bodies and how to communicate that information to the communities, especially in local language and in visioning how they can then improve these problems. So we also need to enhance institutional capacities. For example, of the ruas to collect, store and use data. So CBOs like ours can use remote sensing to increase government accountability and then governments need communities so that they can understand these ecosystems and then they also need the community so that they can define the solutions together with the communities and remote sensing can facilitate that kind of mutual learning. Remote sensing and community knowledge can be powerful tools to promote accountability of both. Neither is a saint or a devil. I think it's a bit of both. So everybody needs to also be held accountable including communities, including governments. So remote sensing can facilitate discussions of historical and contextual issues some of which are very sensitive and the comparison of historical and current remote sensing data can show the success or the failure of the government approaches to conserving basins. So that is us members of them at the River Community Network. We welcome all of you to help us. We are ready to host anybody with technical knowledge. We listened to, I think Florence, the kind of data she's collecting and we welcome even tips on the equipment to use and how to go about collecting this data to make it relevant and to make it address actual issues and problems that we're currently facing in the Arctic Basin. Thank you very much. Violet, thank you very much. I think your presentation is going to stimulate quite a lot of discussion at the end of the day today, particularly your suggestion around the use of citizen science as a link into remote sensing. So I look forward to the discussion about that a little bit later. If you will stop sharing, we can do the transition to clear our next speaker. Meanwhile, I do see a question is for Malus. Okay, so no questions for Violet at this stage, but I'm sure people will pick those up shortly and I already have a couple of questions for the session at the end of the presentation, that open Q&A session. Okay, so in that case, let's move on to our third speaker. It's a pleasure to introduce my colleague from IHE Delft, Claire Furlong. Claire is co-lead and deputy lead of the risk wash project and she is a senior lecturer and researcher in sanitation here at IHE Delft. She's got a lot of experience in the wash, what we call washers sector. No, I don't think we call it a sector, just in wash. And she has done a lot of work in humanitarian and development context. So Claire, we look forward to hearing from you and we can't hear you, but you are muted. That's why- Can you hear me now? Now we can hear you. Oh, excellent. I have to apologize for my voice because I'm a bit sick at the moment. So what I want to do is I'm gonna take you from the world of remote sensing to sanitation in refugee camps. But my project is more about the process rather than the technology because we're right at the start of this project. So I'm looking at embedding our work in the humanitarian sector in this presentation. And what you can see in the first slide is all of the logos from our partners and sounding board. And I'll talk a bit about them later. So I won't introduce them now. My slide seems stuck. Okay, there we are. So the objectives of this presentation is to reflect upon the co-creation of the RISCBOSH project, to discuss why embedding research is essential in humanitarian contexts and to reflect upon how we hope this will lead to impact. So this project or this presentation is much more about the process rather than the project. But if you have questions about the project, I'll be happy to answer them later. So before we go into this, you need to know a bit about the aim of our project. And what we're looking at is we're looking at trying to quantify health risks from different transmission pathways associated with FECAL SLUDGE Management. So when I use the term FECAL SLUDGE Management throughout this presentation, just think of sanitation. And we're looking at sanitation in humanitarian contexts. And especially within camps, that's the context that we're looking at. So in RISCBOSH, what we're trying to do is we're trying to adapt decision-making tools that have been developed for the development sector for the, we're going to adapt them from the humanitarian context, hopefully to improve public health outcomes. So what we're really trying to do here is provide information for evidence-based decision-making within the humanitarian context. So to reflect upon the co-creation, I need to describe how the project was developed. So it started in 2020 with a call from ELRA. And this was for research in humanitarian crisis with a specific focus on public health research. And when we looked at this call, we also reviewed, there was a gap analysis from the sector. And we reviewed this and we came up with the idea of looking at FECAL SLUDGE Management or Sanitation because there was a lack of attention on sanitation in this sector. And because we use this gap analysis to inform our proposal, our proposal was very demand-driven. So we was very much trying to fill a gap that the sector itself had highlighted. So we formed our initial consortium. There was IHE Delft in the Netherlands, University of North Carolina in the USA, ICDDRB in Bangladesh. And we also incorporated or we worked with the FSM TWIG. Now the FSM TWIG, this is the FECAL SLUDGE Management Technical Working Group. And this is a global advisory on humanitarian sanitation. And it also has pathways into national and local wash clusters. And that's how washes managed in the humanitarian sector. We was also working with the Netherlands Red Cross. So we co-created the proposal both with the FSM TWIG and the Netherlands Red Cross who are from the humanitarian sector and they have multiple actors from that sector in those organisations. Sorry. So ICDDRB are from Bangladesh and they have a vast amount of experience in doing undertaking research in Cox's Bazaar. And that's where we hope to do this research. And you may have heard of Cox's Bazaar because it's the largest refugee camp in the world. The reason that we chose this area was that it has a high diversity of different sanitation systems and strategies there. And our proposal at this time was focused on the effectiveness and the impact of sanitation on the public health of the communities within the refugee camp. Now sadly this proposal was unsuccessful but during this process we received a lot of feedback from the sector itself because they reviewed the proposal and we was able to write a rebuttal. Now in the review as the proposal they really wanted quantifiable health outcomes. They was really looking for randomized controlled trials which is kind of the gold standard of studies undertaken in the public health sector and we wasn't gonna do that and we never was. They also questioned how we'd embedded our research within the humanitarian sector. And this was mainly due to I suppose a lack of clarity about the flow of knowledge and information from the research to the humanitarian community itself. So was this initial proposal embedded in the humanitarian sector? Well, it was demand driven. We had worked from a document and from a gap in knowledge that the sector had identified itself. We had involved and been involved and co-developed the proposal with the humanitarian sector and that was with the FSM twig and with the Netherlands red cross but this could be seen as being a much higher level maybe a global level more than a local level. We lacked local partners and we lacked clarity on how we would manage the knowledge flows to and from the project itself and the humanitarian sector and we lacked local academic partners. So we could say that it's not really embedded or not clearly embedded in the humanitarian sector at this point. Then came another opportunity in 2002 when there was the call for the DUPC3 large scale proposals. What we did then was we reactivated our network and you can see our initial network are those institutes that are highlighted in black or have black font. And then what we did was we identified new partners through our networks and our previous collaboration. An example of that is BRAC. So we'd IHE and we'd worked as IHE we'd worked with BRAC in the past. We'd done training on humanitarian sanitation with them in Cox's Bazaar. We also expanded to another country. This was suggested by the Netherlands red cross. So we expanded to cover in Reppie in Uganda and then we brought in the Ugandan red cross. Once we had our consortium together, we co-created and reframed the proposal around the concept of risk and risk management. And this creation and co-creation of the proposal was done both at the proposal writing stage and at the inception stage. So is the proposal embedded now within the humanitarian sector? We would probably say it's more embedded now because it's embedded both at the local level with local NGOs that are managing the fecal sludge treatment plants. Those are the plants that are treating the waste within those camps. And also at a global level through the FSM twig and the Netherlands red cross. So why is embedding research essential? So it's essential when you're working in the humanitarian in the humanitarian sector because the sector itself is involved with the governance of the camp settings. And that's very different to general governance. They control the access to the camps. They're also safeguard, sorry about this, safeguard the community's safety and there's also a high standard for ethics related to research in camp settings that they also oversee. So I would say it's almost impossible not to do research within humanitarian camp settings without embedding your research in the humanitarian sector. So why do we think this will improve impact? Well, our research is demand driven. So it comes from a problem that's been stated by the sector, so we're investigating that. And we're on this journey together. We've got an ongoing collaboration at global, national and local level. So we're in constant consultation with the different organizations from the FSM twig to the local clusters. An example of this is when we selected the fecal surge treatment plants that we want to use in our study, we did that through a series of collaborations both at national and local level. Another example of this is that we're building local humanitarian capacity in the tools that we're gonna be using so we're doing training sessions next year. And this goes beyond the members of our consortium to the wider humanitarian sector. So this was just, this is the final slide, which is about just ongoing collaboration. So we're always checking the relevance of our work by working closely with the FSM twig and the local wash clusters and through other activities like participating in the emergency environmental health forum. And this is, oh, this is our stories. This is the story of our project so far. Thank you for listening. And I'm happy to answer any questions about the process or the project itself. Okay. Thank you, Claire. I think there are two questions in the chat. I haven't quite, I saw one that I was quite specific. If you just go back, two slides please. I had a quick question I wanted to clarify. No, I think the next one. Anyway, you said something about the tools that you would be using. What are those tools? Can you just explain that briefly? Excellent question. So these are tools that have been used in the development context to assess risk at different stages of what we would call the Sanitation Value Chain. So we'll be using three different tools. One of them is a Sanipath tool which looks at risk. It looks at visualising the amount of risk there is in different transmission through different transmission pathways for different groups of people. There is the Sanitation Safety Planning Tool which looks at risk at different stages of fecal surge treatment. So at the treatment process and you can do different kinds of risk assessments with that and then we're looking at QMRA and also looking at screening of the fecal sludge for pathogens. So there are a number of different tools related to risk assessment that we will be adapting for the humanitarian context. Okay. Does that make sense? Yes, thank you. I was interested in what those tools were. So it's mainly to do with risk assessments. Yeah. Okay, so what we do now is we move on to a general Q&A session but there are a couple of questions I'd like to ask the presenters to give us a bit of a sort of see if we can pull some of these things together a little bit. Meanwhile, there are a number of questions in the Q&A addressed to the three of you. Violet, are you still with us? Yes. Okay, good. All right. Okay, so I think it's been an interesting session. Remember, our session is about technology for impact and we've heard from Marluse and Violet about remote sensing as a technology and from Claire, I think more about some of the more the tools that they use for risk-based assessment. But it struck me that in all of them, there was something around a way in which that quite technical information is interpreted or transferred to a different audience from those that develop it. Claire mentioned visualization. Marluse mentioned a sort of role of some intermediaries. It wasn't the farmers that used the remote sensing directly. There were some intermediary and Violet mentioned citizen science. So I just invite the three of you to sort of comment on the importance of how this sort of technical information is translated to its intended user. If the intended user is not the technical expert who developed it, who can I ask to kick off? Did I? Yeah, Claire. Oh, sorry. I was gonna say, what's of interest to us is we're looking at developing or adapting the tools and each of the tools has a visual component. So it's very different, the development of the tool and the user of the tool and who's gonna be using the output of the tool. So we're looking at having a very, like having infographics that are very simple. So a lot of the tools have these very simple infographics that can then be interpreted quite easily by the users. And we've got quite a bit of experience in tool development. But one of the parts of this actual project is also to look at how useful the tools are within themselves once they've been developed. So looking at who the users would be and discussing with them if these are actually usable for them and it's something that they're willing to do. And also looking at those that will be using the outputs from the tools for decision-making to see whether that is gonna be clear for them. Because this is probably the first stage of the project and the development of the tools that we're looking at adapting for the humanitarian sector. I don't know if that's answered your question. I think I've just described our process. I think it does because I think that importance of those infographics, those sort of intermediary products is obviously very important and the development of them and how they are then interpreted or perceived and received is an important aspect of the work which it sounds like you will be covering. So maybe if I can move to Violet then because Violet is that simple map which you highlighted as being so important a form of an infographic and how would you build more on that? Yeah, for me, I think the problem even starts with who defines the research? I started my professional career as a researcher with the Kenya Wildlife Service and even the research agenda was defined from outside. So right from the beginning it was a lot of keenness to count the number of elephants. And that was a research agenda that when we would then go and find out their problems with human wildlife conflict it doesn't matter that there are 20 elephants in this forest, when they come and destroy your crop 20 or 21 or 22 that may not be your most important issue. It might be more important to understand the migratory patterns, ways to, you know the research agenda itself the definition of that has in most times come from academics. You see a lot of research on water bodies, PhD, masters online and many times those are people not from the community. So I may come from a place near Nairobi but I go to a place in a very different at the coast and do research there. So there is already a disconnect because the people themselves are not the ones defining their research issues. Like for example, in Kenya we have a very big problem with water quality because of the high fluoride levels. But a lot of these boreholes are being drilled and they are supplying water with a lot of fluoride at a high level yet it's very difficult to get water quality testing for fluoride as a citizen. So what we in our project would like to do we'd like to make science more accessible to us as citizens so that the scientists can then come listen to our problems and help us define tools help us like now we are looking for what is the good equipment to do what a quality testing what is a more affordable equipment if I had money, what should I buy? So we want scientists to now respond to us and our needs and then we together co-create the research and that way even the dissemination will become much easier because we'll have understood it right from the beginning. So I think that's I don't know whether it goes round the issue but that's how I would see it. What I understand in the context of this session which is technology for impact you see it as part of that broader discussion about framing the research and the tools that will be used. Okay, thank you. Marluse do you want to respond to that on this issue of interpreters or intermediaries between the data and the various levels of user? Yeah, no definitely because I mean that's one of the things that we were struggling with in the first couple of phases because we also needed from our understanding from our perspective understand what the data could tell us but we also didn't have enough information on what was needed on the ground. So there was a bit of a trying to figure out where to go what kind of focus to put on the data analysis because of course us as scientists are very interested in seeing what the data can tell us and do more analysis and more validation, et cetera but that's not the type of information that somebody needs on the ground and actually especially during the COVID period we had in the first phase also planned to go into the field to talk to farmers you know what kind of information do they need and we weren't you know it wasn't possible for us to go to the field and we actually utilized some of these local centers and we trained them and they could go to the field and I actually think even now you know we are able to go into the field but does it really make sense for us to go once every so many months and then you know we pop up and we have a discussion to really understand what's going on what kind of information do these people in the field need and actually we should utilize much more people on the ground, experts on the ground to make that translation and we support them from our end we're not the ones driving you know what comes out of the analysis and what the tool should look like no they should drive it and we support them with you know technical issues or something like that but it should come really from the field through the intermediates and then we are there you know just to provide the technical and support rather than the other way around when we develop something we say okay you need to do an irrigation performance assessment and this is what the analysis will tell you so I think that connection is very important. Okay thanks Marius. So perhaps moving on to one of those ways of making connections Violet and Clare well Violet mentioned citizen science Clare's brief description of the project did mention citizen science but you didn't in the presentation. Clare seemed to have disappeared. Oh she's back. And perhaps Marius you have some experience of that and I know it's a topic that people are quite interested in so perhaps I'd like to invite the three of you to just reflect on the role of citizen science as in this world of technology for impact or in this theme of technology for impact. Violet shall I ask you to kick off? Yeah okay. Yeah I think since I've been now researching on citizen science I think in the past the divide between scientists and citizens was much broader and then there was the element that scientists and I'm as guilty as you know the rest of the other scientists I did start off my career as a scientist. Scientists tended to look at citizens even if they observed something unless the scientists came and did some control where they set up an experiment and then they would not believe what the citizens were saying unless they came in and did their own controlled experiments on an issue. Now since then citizens have come up and they're now playing a very big role like because I started off as a zoologist they're playing a very big role like on iNaturalist there's apps where you contribute to take up a certain species of a plant or whatever you upload it you're part of the identification of it you are contributing to the body of knowledge and there are now many apps coming up and there's a much more interest now in citizen science like I googled and found a company in the Netherlands called Drinkable Rivers and it's two young ladies who started this company and they're providing kits you buy a kit that you can measure E. coli and then you can do the water turbidity you can measure those things as a citizen so we purchased one such kit and even just by sharing information about we are testing water quality on Facebook people are interested they're like I've been suspecting my water quality is not all that can I send you samples so citizen science has now grown and now I think scientists are catching up because citizens are saying it's me drinking this water I want to know what's in this water so they're taking steps to actually start finding out how do I test the quality of the water I'm drinking so the scientists now have also realized that this is an opportunity so I think that gap is closing and that's a good thing because science is exciting and it should be accessible to more people it shouldn't be up there it should be children should be taught how to engage in science even if that's not their career path but as part of citizens yeah okay thank you and of course some of those apps are a really good example of technological development and by the way of mention of Drinkable Rivers Leanne who is one of the founder members was our guest speaker at graduation last year I think Claire do you want to comment on citizen science particularly perhaps in the context of humanitarian and camps yeah I mean I think within the context of this project I don't think we've used the term citizen science and we've gone away from that and we've used like I've got more of a foundation in the development sector so we look at participation and because our project is co-developed by the sector itself and embedded we're looking at how we can be as participatory as possible in the development and adaptation of the tools and the tools themselves some of them are very participatory so the if anybody's familiar with sanitation safety plan and water safety planning actually normally the risk assessments are done with the people that actually work at the plants and involve them quite actively and that's what we're hoping to continue this on this kind of participatory approach when we adapt these tools and then when we talk about the people that are working at the plants they're actually members of the communities themselves so they come from the camp communities so there is involvement there and we're also looking at incorporating lots of participatory methods when we're looking at developing and adapting the tools so having the refugee community involved in that process but we're not really using citizen science within this project I think as Violet has framed it okay but the participation is absolutely critical yeah, participation, co-creation and also and people having ownership of the processes yeah so Marluse maybe on to you I mean we hear a lot about citizen science as a way of doing validation for remote sensing or other technologies but I think there might be more to it than that and certainly and also maybe not focusing necessarily on the term of citizen science perhaps like Claire mentioned using more participatory approaches but perhaps you can comment on that in the context of water yeah, no exactly so I mean we're trying to okay, we're interested from a scientific point of view in validating remote sensing data but the whole idea of having the local data collection so for instance the example that I showed in Kenya where we have soil moisture sensors that were that were installed locally that were read out locally so there were actually people going into the fields taking the records it wasn't like put in the cloud and we were behind our computers here accessing the data and analyzing that no, there were people on the ground that were taking the readings that were interpreting the readings and then as a grace to us they were also sharing the data with us so we could do some analysis with it but I think the important thing is that if you do ask people to collect data that it's not going to be a black box and it's going to be data that's also relevant for them that they can utilize and maybe also learn from and see oh, but if it goes below a certain level then I need to do something and that we can also help them making those kinds of responses based on our models and analysis but that the data actually brings an added value to the person who is collecting the data rather than it just being there'll be our local field observer or field managers that collect data for us and we take it away and we do with the data whatever we want to do but that it actually becomes an integral part of how they manage the system and that it has a value for their management so I think that is very important if you talk about citizen science Okay, well thanks, that's very interesting there are a number of things in the Q&A which are more focused questions and I do see that there are three people online who have raised their hands I can't see who those people are for some reason I just see three raised hands but if we can I'd invite those people to ask a question in person it's quite nice to get a bit of involvement in that way now I don't know how the technology works so I'm going to ask the support team to open the mic and video of one of the three people who have their hands raised Let me support you here I have unmuted Ivan Rodriguez but this person now needs to unmute So Ivan Rodriguez if you can go ahead and ask your question unmute yourself and then the panellists can respond that doesn't seem to be working Nadine perhaps we should try someone else this person needs to unmute so I ask to unmute and then Taquele can you please come forward and ask a question who have you invited to come forward Taquele Te Showme Taquele are you there that does not seem to be working third time lucky perhaps who is your third the third person with their hand up that is Risham Lal Podel allowed to talk Risham sorry for the confusion as to unmute are you with us and can ask your question mainly I must be speaking for the every little party for the other limit right what was the well Risham it looks like third time was not so lucky because we we heard you briefly and now you seem to have disappeared perhaps then you should ask your question in the Q&A okay so we had 20 minutes for the Q&A and we now are at that time though I see we still have a little bit of time left in the session Violet it looked like you wanted to say something so let me ask you to respond yeah because I'm seeing there's in the chat and also in the Q&A there's a discussion about just data collection is only one aspect but even how do you store the data how you then you know ensure the the credibility of that data even going forward requires resources and certain institutional capacities and that is one of the challenges we have like like in our countries who will store that data who will ensure that the next person who's collecting that data is doing it correctly and all that and that's that's one area where personally I mean not to be quoted but I feel like our academic institutions have really let us down because if universities could take up like regular data collection where they have you know students coming in every year and they could then have the professors ensuring the quality of the data and they could store it because most of these are public institutions they're public universities so that it is accessible but currently the situation is our universities treat data like its proprietary rights to them and it's difficult to access even when they collect data even for the communities so I think as somebody is saying data collection and even citizen science needs to be accompanied by a lot of advocacy because there needs to be even advocates about getting these instruments for for communities to know which are the good instruments that they can use and they may be able to even get financing but if they don't know what is the right instrument they will not and getting that information from academic institution it's like pulling tea so I think there's an attitude change that we all need to get towards data towards science and its role in society I think maybe we need to have like a crusade where we go preaching to people the importance of using data to improve our collective lives which currently there are some gaps and I agree with the people putting things in the chat okay thanks Violet Claire or Marius do you want to comment on that at all no I think that's very relevant but also like the the owner of the data and how do you ensure you know the ownership but also if there's specific information you know locality I mean you have data and it is linked to a certain location so how does that then reflect if you make that open available how does it reflect on you know the person who you know owns that piece of land in terms of for instance water consumption you know does now the I don't know the the water the the ministry of water come and bill you because you have you know use a certain amount of water how does that work in and is there private information also included in that and yeah really who owns the data and how you deal with that I think that's very important there do you want to comment at all I just want to reiterate that knowledge and data in the humanitarian sector is something that can be quite problematic because there's a high turnover of staff and data gets lost and knowledge gets lost from projects and programs because they're quite short as well so there's one of those there's that issue there with programming and projects in the humanitarian sector and and also in the humanitarian sector there's quite an interesting thing where quite often they collect a lot of data but they don't do a lot with it so collect data collection for the sake of data collection is something that I definitely see which is quite an interesting issue just to add to the discussion okay so what I'm going to do just to to wrap this up is just ask each of the panelists to respond very quickly to one question I'm going to ask and then we'll move on to Fariana to to do a summary as the rappel term so the topic today was technology well technology for impact was our topic okay we've talked about data we've talked about citizen science we've talked about some aspects of technology which each of you have introduced so I want to come back to this issue of technology for impact and perhaps ask three of you is technology exclusive or inclusive and how do we make it inclusive pilot yeah I don't I think technology is like a knife it's neither inclusive nor exclusive it is the user of the knife who decides how they use it and currently the scientists have actually made technology exclusive they made it difficult for if you're not even if you're a scientist in another sector trying to get information in a different sector is very difficult again so I think it's yeah I don't know whether that answers but it is not the technology technology you can you can take like a tablet to a lady in the village who has really doesn't have much formal education but she's able to punch punch around and her grandson or granddaughter shows her and within no time there's somewhere chop chop within no time they're using their ipad they are there they're talking with their friends and and all that so technology is is a tool that we need to demystify and we need to get in the hands of more people okay thank you I like the knife analogy Marlou so clear I personally think it's to do with the approach that it's set in and how it's developed and that really um really then leads to whether it's inclusive or exclusive so it's to do with how you have kind of increased kind of participatory designs and approaches and in terms of tool development it's having a clear idea of who the tools are being developed for and developing them with those people and who the outputs being developed for and develop it with them so it's working with people rather than in isolation and embedding things you do within the context that you you want them to be or you yeah it's to do with embedding within communities and developing with people yeah I think yeah and associated with that I guess is breaking down some of those barriers to access and yeah Marlou's yeah no I think it can be but it doesn't necessarily is so it can for instance have with these this vapor data which is big data enormous amount of information but how do you process it make it you know into bite-sized chunks of information that people can understand and and utilize I think that's where the power is but then the question is who makes that translation from the big data to those chunk-sized images chunk-sized data information structures and do they charge a cost for it and do we actually make those those chunk-sized information are they responsive to the local need and and what you know what what kind of information is needed or is it just some information random information that is interesting but it's not really relevant so I think it can be but only if you use it in a way that can help making it more inclusive so I think that's also one of our main challenge in the in the next phase of the project how do we make it inclusive compared to you know what we've done in the first phase which is you know still a bit exclusive and a bit high level analysis that we've done okay all right well thank you very much to our three panelists I think we've had some three very interesting presentations and some very useful and insightful comments to the questions that have been raised there will still be an opportunity for all three panelists to type directly the answers in the Q&A session to the questions addressed to them so now let me hand over to Fayana as our rapporteur to give us a summary of our session today thanks to you thank you Graham thank you Graham it's it the session was really really engaging especially I'd like to thank moderator as moderator you have moderated it very well so in sometimes joining a seminar or workshop online it's sometimes like okay maybe I can just switch on the zoom or the platform and then I should do something else but all four of you didn't get that chance to be away from the discussion so thank you very much it was very engaging for me and being an outsider of those projects I was listening very closely and as the topic chosen technology for impact so I had a very being an entrepreneur especially in Bangladesh especially working in the sanitation sector so what was very intriguing for me like we recently have introduced a technology platform to for the decision making process and also to reach our customer also to serve them really well also to know their feedback and also to hear them so I was hearing all of your approaches I mean and also I really agreed with the notion or the gap that has the technology or the scientist or the people who are academician the people who are working in the ground or the user level so there is a still divide especially in the context like us like Bangladesh or Kenya or Nigeria or some other places so still we don't have enough data or the data that already have we don't have access so we can't take the right decisions and we don't know how to make the right decisions because those things are not available and also in some cases those are not affordable so when I see the approaches that Marlos mentioned like they were trying to adopt their tools that can be used for the people who are really in the ground I mean especially the farmers for the irrigation I mean how they will manage their water that will be really helpful otherwise scientists will do their researches and the farmers they don't even know their languages you know so that needs to be done and thank you very much to all of you because you are doing this and for Violet you are very energetic about what you are saying to reduce that gap about science or citizen science and whatever the term we can say sometimes it's as a field worker it's sometimes we don't understand it it's the buzzword sustainability resilience or it's citizen science or participatory approach or whatever it is but we need to understand the people what they really need and how we can how tools can be used for those people and Claire I was really really happy to see because it's from Bangladesh and also to know about the failures and how you are working here and improving your method your approaches to make it more clear and make it more grounded so that's what I feel and I will be very happy to learn more about the projects that have just started what would be the outcome I will be very happy to learn more of them so thank you all of you thank you Fariana for your summary thanks very much to our presenters and to the audience I think the Q&A kept kept the presenters on their toes and I see they still have some questions to answer and a nice chat that has been going on in the chat box too so thank you very much for your participation everyone and let me now hand over or hand back to Nadine to wrap up the day thanks very much Graham very engaging very interesting session we are here in the back end where as the technical persons we're in the same room we have also been engaging with the discussions very much of course you couldn't hear us fortunately I want to thank all of you Graham Farana Marlos Claire Violet very interesting thanks for joining us I'm sure this is going to continue in the homes in the universities in the offices of people they take something home it was very insightful yeah what more can I say this is the end of day one and I think it was great I'm looking very much forward to day two which will start with a session on diversity for impacts and I'm sure that's also going to be very interesting so hope to see all of you there and enjoy the rest of the day