 Today, we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2015 webinar series, and we'll focus today on the topic of future-proofing water systems in developing countries. Today's webinar was developed in collaboration with Improved International and the Water Collective, and you'll hear about both of those organizations shortly. My name is Yana Aranda, and I will be one of the moderators for today's webinar. When I'm not doing this, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, as well as Engineering for Change, where I am a senior program manager in our Engineering for Global Development Department. Now, before we move on to our presenters, we thought it would be a good idea to remind you about E4C and who we are. We are a global community of over 800,000 people worldwide, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs and social scientists who work together to solve humanitarian challenges faced by communities around the world. Examples of those include access to potable water, off-grid energy solutions, effective health care, agriculture, sanitation, and other interventions. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition, as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out our website, www.engineeringforchange.org, to learn more and to sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series, a free publicly available series of online seminars showcasing the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field. Information and upcoming installments in the series, as well as archive videos of past presentations, can be found on our webinar's page and you see the URL there. If you're following today on Twitter, I'd also like to invite you to join us in this conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. E4C's next webinar will be on March 25th, at 10 am Eastern Standard Time with Joseph Fernandez of Trade with Our Borders. Our topic will be Accessing the Bottom of the Pyramid, Practically Managing Global Supply Chains for the Base of the Pyramid. Visit the E4C webinars page for registration details. If you're already an E4C member, we'll be sending you an invitation to the webinar directly. I hope you'll join us, it'll be a really exciting one. Now, a few housekeeping items before we get started. On this period, you're now seeing there are a number of different widgets on the dashboard at the bottom. The group chat is where you will interact with your fellow attendees and post any comments about the webinar. Use the Q&A widget to submit any questions to the presenter. 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We are so excited to have all of you join us today. It's always thrilling to see the different participants from around the world. Welcome to you all. Now, just a reminder again that you can use the group chat to type in any remarks that you have and interact with your fellow attendees. If you want to know the weather that's currently in Manisha, India, feel free to ask. You don't forget to use the Q&A window to type your questions to the presenter. That enables us to keep track of all the questions. If you encounter any troubles viewing or hearing the webinar, you may want to try opening Webcast Elite up in a different browser. Also, feel free to access the help widget for technical help. I'll follow the webinar to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development, our PDH, for this session. Please follow instructions at the top of our webpage and you see the URL listed on the slide right now. Also, please make sure to take a moment to fill out our short survey. Your opinions are invaluable to the webinar series. Without your comments and suggestions, the webinar series wouldn't be what it is today. Now, I'd like to turn it over to our guest moderator, Sophia Sun Wu, who is the CEO and co-founder of The Water Collective, a social enterprise focused on securing life-lasting clean water through robust solutions and economic empowerment. Take it away, Sophia. Thanks, Yana. So, hi. My name is Sophia Sun Wu from The Water Collective. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you all about today's webinar, future-proofing water systems in developing countries, how to protect investment and increase success to preventative maintenance. Today, 750 million people around the world lack access to safe water. That's approximately one in nine people. On average, 40 percent of rural water systems in developing countries stop working a few years after their build. While billions of dollars in aid money has been thrown at this problem, recent monitoring of water systems in several countries show that they continue to break down. One of the most common culprits of this issue is the lack of preventative maintenance. E4C has invited one of the leading experts on the subject, Suzanne Davis, Executive Director of Improve International, to share her insight. Suzanne, we thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series, generally, Yana Ronda of ASME, Holly Shiter-Brown, Michael Mater, and Steve Welch of IEEE, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anyone out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact them via the email address at this wellness slide, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Now, I'd like to introduce Susan. Susan Davis is the Founder and Executive Director of Improve International. She has 23 years of leadership roles in both the for-profit and non-profit world. She served on the boards of the Millennium Water Alliance, the Wash Advocacy Initiative, now Wash Advocates, and the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. Susan has evaluated international development projects in 18 countries and managed a $1 million wash project in China. She was also on the senior management team at Water for People. She began her work in the national development with Water Partners International, now Water.org, and has also worked with CareUSA. She's not an engineer, but she went to college with a lot of them at Georgia Tech. So, Susan, I will now let you take the floor. Thank you, Sophia, and thank you so much to Engineering for Change for inviting me to present today, and thanks to all of you for joining the webinar today. I imagine it's kind of late for some of you and too early for others. So, you might wonder why I have a picture of a vintage car as my first slide. Well, not only was this my first and favorite car, but I often compare the idea of giving a water system to poor people to the idea of giving a very poor person a car. So, what's wrong with a free car? It sounds great, doesn't it? If you were poor and you needed a reliable way to get to work, wouldn't a free car be great? Well, in the U.S., that car wouldn't really be free. Depending on the kind of car, you'd have to pay about $4,000 in federal and state income taxes, and that's a lot of cash to come up with right away, especially if you didn't have that much money to begin with. A few other problems with a free car is gas isn't free, maintenance isn't free, insurance isn't free, and then there's ongoing taxes and license fees and emissions tests, none of which are free. So, let's imagine that we're giving this free car now to a poor person in a rural area in a developing country. The free car gets even worse. The person might not know how to drive, or they might not know about how to do maintenance or the fact that they even need to do maintenance, like oil changes. Even if they knew, they probably don't have the equipment to do it, and there might not be a gas station anywhere nearby where they could buy gas. So, let's think about this for a second. How is a free car like a free water system? Similar challenges apply. The person or the community who gets the system might not know how to take care of it, even if they get training. They might not have the money to do what they're supposed to be doing to take care of it. And even if they do have the money, the incentive for using or taking care of the system might not be what the organization giving it expected. In many places, people expect water to be free. Individuals might expect the organization who build the system, whether they're charitable or governmental, to be responsible for the maintenance. So, recurring costs for water system maintenance that have been measured in various countries that range from about $3 to $6 per person per year for a borehole or hand pump, and about $3 to $15 per person per year for piped water systems. Now, that doesn't sound very expensive to Americans or people in other developed countries, but we need to remember that many of the people who are getting water systems often make something like $1 to $2 per day. So, water systems and cars lacking preventive maintenance work poorly or stop working altogether. Just like my beautiful car in this picture, I didn't take very good care of it because I was in college. But as long as people have been building things, cars, water systems, everything else, we know that they must be properly operated and maintained to work well and to last long into the future. So, let's talk about future proofing. First, let's talk about the importance of water. Obviously, water is much more important than a car. In 2010, the United Nations recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation, or toilets, are essential to the realization of all human rights. And yet, as Sophia mentioned earlier, half of the world's population remains deprived of access to safe water and toilets. Now, you've probably seen numbers that show it's a much smaller number that don't have access to improved water, but if we're talking about safe water, if we're talking about water quality, it's really a much higher number who don't have access. So, this is my sad slide. I feel a little bit like Debbie Downer when I show it, but it's important for us to recognize this. A lot of time and money is wasted in misguided efforts to provide safe drinking water for people in rural communities and developing countries. And this is across the board. It's governments. It's charities. It's volunteer groups. On average, this graph shows you that about 40% of these water systems stop working often just a few years after they're built. We created this graph using more than 120 studies that range from program level to national level, and the average failure rate has stayed about the same, about 40% since 1997. We're still collecting these data, and actually, if you have any studies that you can share, we'd love to get them. We're really trying to track this, so we ideally can see the number go down. Billions of dollars in aid money, as we've heard already, have been thrown at this problem, but it still persists. So, I found it improved international about the same time as Engineering for Change in 2011 to address the crisis behind the global water crisis. That is the ongoing failure of our current approaches. This is based on the belief that people deserve to have high quality water services, not just for life, but for generations. Here's another really important. We talk a lot about water is for health and water toilets are for dignity and hand washing is for health, but a big problem with broken water systems is that we are wasting poor people's money. The trend in recent decades has been to encourage or require communities to contribute a portion of the capital cost of a water system to help build it. But when a water system fails, they don't get their money back. They don't get their time back either. This is an example of a board that shows the various contributions to build a water system in India, and you can see that the villagers or the water users' contribution is quite significant. So, we talk a lot about functionality when we're thinking of a water system, but there are elements beyond that. Functionality basically means is the water flowing or not, and it's a relatively common way to look at water access over time, but it doesn't tell us about some critical aspects of service, like quality, quantity, reliability, and accessibility. This graph shows an example, and this is from our friends at IRC in the Netherlands. It shows an example of service levels that were measured in three districts in Ghana, and you can see that very few of them provide even a basic service level, and that's the orange bars at the bottom. You can see they're very minimal for the East Ganga and Sian West. So, why are all these water systems failing? Why are they not functional? Tim Foster, he's over at the University of Oxford, I believe, he used the largest data set assembled on rural water points in Sub-Saharan Africa. It represented about 25,000 aged hand pumps in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. He employed logistic regression analyses to identify operational, technical, institutional, financial, and environmental predictors of functionality. The risk factors he found that were significantly associated with non-functionality across all three countries were the age of the system, the distance from the district or county capital, and the absence of user fee collection. It's pretty easy to see how these factors relate directly to maintenance. The older a system is, the more it needs maintenance. Support for major repairs often comes or is supposed to come from the local government, so the farther away the villages from the local government, the less likely they are able to get help because of challenges with transportation and the local government often doesn't have enough staff. And user fees, of course, are supposed to be used for operations and maintenance and repairs. Foster found many other factors associated with functionality, including the proximity of spare parts, the availability of a hand pump mechanic, regular servicing, and regular water committee meetings. Often many of these rural water points are supposed to be managed by a committee of villagers. So Foster's findings reinforced the concept that several factors are critical for the sustainability of community-managed water services. And they show that these factors remain absent, unfortunately, from a high proportion of water points. So we're talking about maintenance, but I want to put this into context. Even with all the research, we still don't know the root cause behind why so many water systems fail. And it's hard to know whether the maintenance isn't done mostly because there's not enough skilled people to do it, there's not enough money, there's not enough spare parts, or some combination, or other reasons. I believe, though, that one overarching reason is our mindset. The donors and the implementers, the people who are building these systems, many of those who approach the water crisis make simply of access, not of services. And this is partly because of the Millennium Development Goals, which focus on access. But we are missing not just the time dimension, but the human dimension. Humans are the users. Humans make the decisions whether to pay or not. Humans make decisions about whether to do maintenance or not. Humans are the ones who have to remember what to do. This slide is helping us to put maintenance and perspective for the overall cycle of services here. And this is the vicious cycle, not the virtuous cycle. So you can see the quality of services goes down, and all of these factors are interdependent. So users are less likely to pay for bad services, and they're less likely to trust a poorly trained user association, or a community water committee. And poorly trained water committees have difficulty demonstrating accountability, and if they can't collect money, they can't do the services, and so on. It's a sad, vicious cycle, and unfortunately way too common. So let's clarify here what we mean by operations and maintenance. We often use the acronym O&M for this, but let's talk about them all the way out. So operations is basically just the process of keeping the system running. So it could be things like putting fuel in generator or treating water in the storage tank. Routine maintenance is needed to keep the system running at peak performance. Typical cost items for maintenance are listed on this slide for operations and maintenance. They depend on the kind of water system. For example, hand pumps don't necessarily need electricity, but they're often overlooked when picking the technology and when determining the level of service. These decisions on what kind of technology to use are often made far away from the community without their input and without thinking about the lifetime cost. In general, operations expenses per system run about 5% to 20% of capital investment. The need for maintenance has been known for quite a long time, and we all know about how it works in our own countries, but we don't think about it in the developing countries. Somehow we just assume it will be done without confirming how. So I'm not going to talk about how to do maintenance, but rather why we as donors in implementing organizations need to make sure it can and will be done. So let's revisit why operations and maintenance are not happening. If you live in a developed country, I want you to think about where your water comes from and how that utility is managed. This figure shows some of the reasons that make up the puzzle of why O&M isn't happening. Sometimes there's not enough information to plan. There's poor skills on the water committee or in the local government. There's not enough funds collected. There might be some kind of unusual technology that was brought in from outside the country, so no spare parts are available or the mechanics are not trained to know how to fix it. In developing countries, decentralization of responsibility from the national government to local governments for things like water services is the norm. Some national policies, like in Ethiopia and Ghana, say that communities are responsible for their own maintenance. And these are folks, and especially in the really remote rural areas, who might not have had a great education, they're very busy just trying to make a living, and they can't easily access information. They can't look up on the web or order spare parts over the internet. So no matter how well a community water committee is managed, they're likely going to need some kind of help that they can't tackle alone. In this case, they're supposed to either hire an area mechanic or go to the district government, but often those people can't help either. So I'm going to show you the next series of slides. There's our data from an IRC study of hand pumps in rural areas in Ghana from 2013. And I just think they're interesting because they actually show the functionality related to specific factors. So this one shows us that functionality or here, this one is reliability. So it's functionality over time. The reliability is greatly enhanced when preventive maintenance is executed. This is pretty obvious, but this really hits home here. On this, on the following few charts, you'll see essentially they're like traffic lights that green equals functional or reliable, red is not functional or reliable, and yellow is somewhere in between. Using that same study in Ghana, we see there is a direct correlation between well-capacitated or well-trained water management groups and better functionality of water systems. Again, the functionality is shown by green bars and the well-capacitated is on the right. In the communities where the water committees are well-constituted, trained, and gender balanced, water systems broke down less often as shown versus poorly-capacitated water committees. This is yet another reminder that water services are more about people than they are about infrastructure and technology. Full functionality is also increased when the community water committees kept good reports. Just keeping track of what they're doing helps increase functionality. And this might seem obvious as well, but the committees whose annual incomes exceed expenditures must have many more fully functional hand pumps than those who don't. They have money to do the repairs and to do the maintenance. And this might also indicate that they're keeping up with their fee collection and keeping track of those records. These should all be very exciting findings. They're basic common sense, but they might be more exciting to accountants than engineers. This is another chart from the same Ghana study that shows that functionality and reliability increases when spare parts are available. And this, again, seems pretty obvious, and I'm really excited to see that there's a supply chain as the discussion as the next webinar, and it's a really big thing that we're seeing in a lot of places that there just aren't spare parts available. This third bar here that never required spare parts is a little curious, but it's possible those committees have newer installations and haven't yet needed spare parts. This chart is a little more puzzling. This shows us that the functionality is better when area mechanics are available than when they are not. But they're about the same for the committees who never engaged a mechanic. Researchers in the study were not sure why, but again, these could be newer systems, just like the people who didn't yet need spare parts, or they could be hand pumps that are more easily maintained by the committee or something else. So this is a chart from our friends again at IRC, Katarina Fonseca, who's a fantastic economist, and I just love this one because it's so clear about the current situation. New systems are put in place to try to increase water access. So you can see services delivered goes up for a while, and then there's this red line that shows slippage. The services go down over time, and this is because of the lack of maintenance. Somebody installs a new system, and services go up for a while, and then they go down over time. And the smiley and frowny faces represent how the water users feel about this. Now this slide shows us what our goal is here, that a new system is installed, and that it's maintained. And all of the things that happen for that, people are collecting fees, they have access to mechanics and spare parts. This can prevent slippage over time. So they might be down for a few days. You see the little dips here, but overall the reliability is pretty good. So what can we do about this? So as donors or as implementing organizations, as service providers, we can start to look at different ways to improve the way maintenance activities for hand pumps are supported over the long term. And there's a lot of interesting things happening with that that I'll talk about near the end. We can consider that alternative water point management models besides the community management model. So some groups are looking at private sector leasing, where they lease the equipment, and the private sector operator, the company is responsible for keeping the system going. And I would love to hear if you would like to share in the group chat what your organization is doing to support maintenance, or to otherwise improve services over time. So Engineering for Change asked me to talk a bit about a recent report that we put out, and it's called the Resolution Guidelines for Problems with Water Systems. And until the governments and NGOs and others figure things out, let's talk about what we're doing now. And a common response to failure of water systems is to rehabilitate those failed water points. This is more expensive than providing maintenance, but it's a little different. It's about infrastructure, and we like infrastructure. We just do. Major repairs or replacements of water points are common in many water supply interventions, because it's a less expensive way to achieve access numbers than building new water points. And this chart shows up to 80% of water points in some large water intervention programs have been rehabilitations. Several organizations use rehabilitations as a standard part of any new water access program, so technically they are counting the same beneficiaries as another organization did before. But the biggest problem with rehabilitations that they alone are not solving the root cause of the problem. They're just addressing the infrastructure, not the processes and people that are pieces of the puzzle. So the impetus for this Resolution Guidelines Report was the USAID Water and Development Strategy that came out not too long ago. And we noticed this phrase in there that was pretty exciting. You can see where the little arrow is, that they're not only going to do post-implementation monitoring, but they're going to enable reasonable support to issues that arise post-implementation. And this made us wonder, what are the issues that arise post-implementation? What are other people doing to address them? What are the costs and what are the pros and cons of providing such post-construction support? So we put together the guidelines. I'll share a link for the report at the end. Resolution essentially encompasses this idea that addressing problems that are identified through post-implementation monitoring or evaluation. So you find that some systems are not working or that they're broken, and you as the donor or the implementing organization take on some responsibility for that. The case for resolution in summary is that, as we talked about before, access to safe water is a human right. To save lives and change lives, development organizations need to focus on the provision of good water services forever, not just access. Failed and abandoned water systems are a massive waste of investment, not only the donor's money, but also the community's money. Many problems with water services are attributed to poor implementation. So, as you've probably noticed in the things that I've presented so far, it's difficult to determine root causes versus the symptoms, because there's a wide range of interventions and a lack of consistency and rigor in evaluation of those interventions. But the repetitiveness of problems that we've identified by reviewing many, many, many implementation reports across the globe, and it suggests there are common ways to respond. The guidelines that I'm going to talk about are based on the common problems and common recommendations from interviews with many practitioners and an extensive literature review. We've organized them based on the common categories of sustainability factors, social, environmental, technical, financial, and implementation. And I'm going to go through these fairly quickly, because we don't have a lot of time, but you can find more information on them in the Resolution Report. So, overall, we say first, do no harm. Sometimes it's better not to do anything than to do something that might fail. Big picture, we think we need to change the measurements of success. For example, instead of number of beneficiaries or number of water points built, we suggest we aim for providing a basic or above level of service over time. Some example basic service levels or level of service metrics are shown on this slide. And, most importantly, be accountable to water users, not just to donors. Some guidelines related to implementation are that we should shift from an infrastructure focus to facilitation of water service provision, agree on roles and responsibilities for service provision before starting a project, improve monitoring after the project, and donors need to be more flexible in thinking about all of these things. This slide shows an example of a typical project-focused approach at the top, where the NGO takes all the responsibility and then is gone after the project. But here we are showing sort of a joint effort for a while in the middle with the community, the water users, and the implementing organization. Where ultimately, over time, the community takes on all the responsibility. Institutional guidelines. Again, it might sound really obvious, but it's not happening. Governors must engage local governments and work within national frameworks. The governments are the ones, ultimately, who are going to have the money and who do have the responsibility for keeping these water services going. Several other guidelines we'll talk about on this slide. One relates to social issues is to discuss an exit strategy with the local stakeholders. It goes back to the implementation one where how long are we going to be involved? What are we responsible for? It's to consider multiple uses of water and multiple sources of water. This is often, again, we often focus just on drinking water and maybe some for hygiene. A financial guideline, where the slide relates, is to make sure everyone involved, the water committees, the water users, the local governments, understand the specific life cycle costs for this kind of water system. And this, again, is from our friends at IRC and they show the capital expenditure, the main wedge there is the one we often just focus on and we forget about the rest of these things. Technical guidelines, again, work within national standards. A lot of people are bringing in foreign hand pumps or they're not going with what's typical in the area and that makes it really difficult to achieve any kind of economies of scale for mechanics and spare parts. We need to carefully consider water system technology applicability in the context. We need to be able to understand or build spare parts supply chain. I wanted to share a couple of examples of organizations that are doing resolution-related activities. CARE, which is based here in Atlanta, where I am, they use a tool called the Governance into Functionality Tool or GIFT. This slide, and this is a really quick overview of their process, but this slide shows a typical cycle where they look at the functionality of water points. They look at the material action, which is not just rehabilitation. You can see here, for example, they might retrain the WASH committee. Another organization is JICA, which is the Japanese aid agency. They're working on several things in Zambia. This slide just shows a piece of it, but one is adoption of appropriate technologies, training and licensing mechanics, strengthening the supply chain for spare parts. That's what this slide refers to. They're also looking at cost recovery, which includes setting rates and motivating users to pay. There are more examples than their costs described in the resolution report appendices, and I'd love to hear from you participants, whether your organization does anything you consider to be resolution activities. There's another thing that SNV, which is a Dutch organization in East Africa, they're helping with establishment of spare parts supply chains, which goes beyond having a hardware shop. It's a dynamic process. It starts with a simple market analysis and they look at supply and demand, just like anybody who wants to make money should do. But based on the analysis, they assist suppliers with setting up a business model and introduce the approach to actively market products and services. So it's no longer sitting in the shop and waiting for a customer, but they actually go and talk to their customers about what they have. I've got a few slides. I've got a few links for various resources. There's actually an O&M network. There's preventive maintenance of rural water supplies, documents, guidelines for organizing hand-pump maintenance systems, operation maintenance of rural water supply and sanitation systems. These documents, a lot of them are kind of old, but they're still pretty relevant. And I believe that these slides will be available later, so that you don't have to copy them down or screenshot them. Here are some monitoring, evaluation, resolution, and learning resources. Some of us here are calling it Merle, which sounds like a country singer, but these are various that link to the resolution report. You can find the full, long, meaty report there, as well as an executive summary. The WASH advocates folks have a whole portal on sustainability and Merle. And then there's a couple of, the last two are related to different kinds of measurements of success. So Water Person Years is one of them. There's a link to a webinar on that there, and then service levels, as we mentioned before on the IRC WASH website. All of these websites have lots of other wonderful resources as well. And please feel free to get in touch with me through our website at improveinternational.org or reach out to me through Twitter or through our folks at Engineering for Change. And thank you so much for your attention. I'll be happy to take your questions now. Thank you, Susan. That was great. Very informative. Now we're going to open the floor to Q&A. So please use the Q&A window. It's located below the chat window to type in your questions for Susan. So we'll start it off. We have a question about, are there any specific traits, for example, implementation practices, preventative maintenance that are consistent among the 60% of projects that are succeeding in the long-term? Any specific traits? Yeah. Like, are there any specific practices or characteristics that you are observing in 60% of the projects that are succeeding? Oh, of the good projects. That's a great question. I usually focus on the negative parts. There are. Tim Foster's study that I mentioned, the Tim Foster study, does a really good statistical analysis of that across three countries. And in our resolution report, we also kind of look at the common characteristics across various projects. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of great detail on what's working over time. Because most of the studies, if we do monitoring, it's getting better lately, but most of the time they just look at whether the system is functional or not. And we don't really get into a lot of rich detail about why. Now, I have been collecting a series of evaluations on our website as well, where they kind of get into that detail. And we are hoping to try to find the common factors. But basically, it's the things that we highlighted in the study from Ghana, a good water management committee that has some kind of outside support and they know what to do. It's that simple and that hard. Right, absolutely. And I'm sure there's also the issue of figuring out which points you want to gather data on and starting to figure out, okay, X, Y, and Z these are the characteristics we're seeing and figuring out what those indicators are and things like that. So we're also getting a lot of questions about the term of maintenance. So when you use the term maintenance, do you use it to cover both preventative maintenance and as well as repair maintenance? What, you know, how much does that word cover? Well, it covers as much as you want it to cover. Obviously, preventive maintenance is critical. But being able to replace small parts, different people call things repairs versus maintenance. But in general, by maintenance is the ability to keep it going and replace small parts. If you're thinking especially about hand pumps, there's often very simple small things that need to be replaced on a regular basis. So some people might call that a repair and others wouldn't. But it's basically the ability to keep the system going and, you know, sometimes you need spare parts for that, sometimes you need special skills for that. If it's a pipe system, it might be there could be a bubble in the system. There's a lot of different things that happen. Great. And we also have a question about the difference. Is there a difference between the term of water system either being broken down and non-functional? Are they one and the same or are they considered different? That's a great question. And people are defining that differently, unfortunately, in the ways they monitor. There is some effort to try to standardize that across various monitoring efforts, but that's the tricky thing, because you could come up at any point in time and that you're doing essentially a snapshot. So you're saying, okay, these water points on this day that we visited, the water was not flowing. So you might call that non-functional. However, it could be that they were just waiting for repair and somebody comes and fixes it and the water flows again. Now there are other systems, as the questioner asked, that are completely broken down. It might be that the borehole has collapsed or the spring has completely silted up. There might be irreparable or needs rehabilitation rather than just a small repair. So that is another thing we're trying to get clarity around is what is completely broken down versus what is just non-functional at the time. Some of the more recent monitoring efforts are attempting to do that, but to do that takes a little more than observing it. You might have to ask some questions of the people around you to ask more time. So if you're looking at a national monitoring survey or any kind of broad-scale effort, they often don't have a lot of time per water point. That's a great question. Yeah, absolutely. Now I'm also seeing some questions about water committees. So one question someone is asking, could you provide some examples of how you collect water user fees and the process of that water fees if users are not paying the fees? That's another really good question. I've been reading some interesting things lately about different ways that people are collecting fees. A lot of times, and you have to remember in many rural communities, it's basically your neighbors who are asking you for money. There's a lot of work going into looking at what makes it better, but sometimes it's easier to collect money. So a water committee that's legally registered, for example, and has a bank account and keeps good records, they're going to have a better time collecting water fees. And that question about the repercussions is really critical. I have seen in Central America where the person doesn't pay their fees for, say, a certain amount of time, maybe three months, their water is actually cut off. But that is trickier. You have a water system, and if you have a meter or something at the house, but it's trickier to do that when you have a community point like a hand pump. It's harder to cut that person off from using water, and then there's just the basic human nature of everybody needs water, so how do we do that? So there are some different ways that people are trying to go about it. There's the peer pressure, or there's keeping records. There's sometimes people are making it public who has paid and who has not. But that's one of the biggest challenges. And a big piece of it is do they feel like they're getting their money's worth? You know, is it easier to get the water from this hand pump than to go and get it from a free source like a river? You can imagine it's a pretty big challenge. So in some places, they're trying to legalize the fees, make that sort of more of a legal issue than just a, it's nice to have issue. I can do a whole other webinar on that issue. It's a really, really critical one. Well, touching up on that, you mentioned your presentation, the difference between a well-trained water committee and a poorly trained water committee. Let's say if you have to define a well-trained water committee in three or five characteristics, what are some of the characteristics you've seen in water committees that are successful? So one of the critical pieces there is ongoing training. In a lot of places, the water committee is not a monolith. They change every time. People are supposed to be, I think in Honduras, they are supposed to change every two years by law. And some Central American countries by law, the committee has to change membership. And then you lose the people who were originally trained. And the other people might not feel obligated to provide institutional knowledge to the next committee. So some method of ongoing training is really critical. And the training is not just about how often they have meetings, but it's things like bookkeeping and how do you collect the fees and where are they supposed to be saved and who are you supposed to call when there's a bigger problem than you know how to fix and so on and so on. And life cycle costing and planning, major parts might not be replaced or need to be replaced within the same lifespan as the committee. So if it's a two-year committee and then there's a five-year replacement, the next committee might not know about that and might not plan for it. So the biggest key I think is it should be a comprehensive training and it should be regular and new committees need to be trained. There's an organization in Honduras called COSE-PRABIL. COSE-PRABIL acronym, but they essentially have a training center and the water committees are sort of, they form a co-op and they can then, each new committee can go to that training center and receive. Sometimes they'll be targeted training. Sometimes they do overview training. But that's a really nice setup that I've seen and the water systems in that area are lasting 20 years and longer. Absolutely. So I'm also seeing a lot of interest on is it that there aren't that many organizations that exist purely to provide service and maintenance? Why is it that there's such a focus on access and not so much on the service software side of water? Well, I have some very strong opinions on that, but I think to be fair, if you look at a lot of people are driven by the millennium development goals which focus solely on access. The goal was reduced by half. So we focused on access and we also, I think, have a little bit of magical thinking. If we build the water system or the school or the clinic or whatever it is, we just assume that that is going to lead to having water forever or education or clinics. We we, you know, we, you know, we, you know, we just aren't thinking long term. And part of it, and part of my goal is to kind of hold up the mirror and say, actually, things are failing. And the whole point is to help shift our mindsets. We need to think differently about things. If we're really focused on the stuff and not how the stuff provides the service, then we're going to keep failing. Absolutely. So if an organization wants to develop an operations program, where's the best place to start? Well, I'd say look at what other people are doing. You don't have to start from scratch. There are policies in a lot of countries. I've been looking closely at Ghana lately and also at Ethiopia and there's, there are a lot of things in place that maybe could be boosted. So, for example, Ethiopia has a policy now to have a water extension worker in each, I think at the war at a level, which is like a district. They haven't rolled that out all the way yet, but that would be a great place for some of these to step in and say, hey, can we help provide them with training or tools or transportation, rather than kind of starting your own thing. I think the really important thing is to look at the existing structures, what's there, what could be boosted or improved by your help. So, could you speak a little bit to motivation? You talk a lot about these human aspects of keeping water running. Could you speak a little bit to motivation and incentives and how that plays in creating some sustainable frameworks? Well, it's human nature. So, look at what drives people. We come into communities when we say this, you need safe water for your health. And they say, sure, that sounds great. We'll take it. Awesome. But at the end of the day, what is really interesting is you're starting to see things like people are more likely to pay for water when it helps improve their livelihoods. So, hey, this is great. Now I have water for my animals and it's easier than going over to the river and getting them water. Or now I have more water for my crops. We need to really understand what drives people. It's not necessarily health. We're all about human health and this and that, but most people just want to have a better life. Convenience is a factor, maybe more than health or improving your livelihood is more than that. So, we need to think about why people want water, what they're going to use it for, what they're willing to pay for. And let's be like, you know, if you had a busy life and somebody came and gave you this car and said, you have to maintain it and I'm going to train you like, what a pain. I'd rather take it down the street. I'd rather pay somebody to do that. And, you know, we talk about really poor people that they do have some money, you know, you'll go to a place and see they do have a cell phone or they might have a TV, but they don't have safe water. So, let's think about what drives people and, you know, that's going to take a different skill set sometimes, right? A different mindset. We might need to engage some marketing people and behavioral change therapy people and not just the people who know how to build things. I'm sorry to say this to a bunch of engineers, but we need to think a little bit differently. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, we're getting a lot of questions about kind of the specifics of implementing this in real time. So, we have one question asking about tips on how to train users so that when they know that the system needs to be repaired since, you know, the timeline or the timeframe of when something will break down, it's unknown. How do you go about training people for that? How do you go about preparing people for the unexpected? Well, again, I would say look to the past. We have lots and lots and lots of information. A lot of the stuff we're using is pretty old technology. You know, hand pumps have been around for a long time. There's a lot of great information on what it takes to keep them running. And there's a lot of good local knowledge on that. So, you know, for training committees, for example, it might be that we need to provide more simple information, maybe in local languages, maybe using pictures. But again, human nature, maybe they need reminders, you know, and so whose job should it be to, you know, maybe send an SMS text and say, committee, have you guys checked your O-rings? Or have you oiled your handles? Or you need to clean out the tank every month. We might need to think of different ways to motivate people and remind them of stuff, and rather than just expect them to do it all by themselves. And the example I use here is a lot of people have those pictures in their refrigerator or the little filter on your tap, and you know, that's a filter that you have to replace. And sometimes it has a little green light and a red light, and that's the best thing ever, because you look at that and go, oh, yeah, I don't want to drink that water. But my picture in the fridge, you know, I have to remember to replace it every three months. And, you know, here I am, like, I studied human health and I look at safe water, and I'm not replacing that filter. So... So, are there any particular components of water systems, for example, pumps, valves that you've seen that are more prone to failure? And in addition to that question, are there any technologies that you've seen that are not as well received in communities? Yes, and yes, and there's a lot of good information on that. I can't list off the different kinds of technologies off the top of my head, but there is a group that is looking, it's called WashTech, and they are looking at Technology Applicability Framework, and that's another link that I share with you guys, but they've identified several factors that can be looked at both forwards and backwards. There are things, you know, and I've seen different examples of this, like one of them, we thought there was a windmill somebody had put out in the middle of the desert, and it was supposed to power the pump, and the people who lived around there were nomadic or pastoralists, and they, you know, moved their cows around, and the cows were scared of the windmill, so they actually broke it on purpose. So, you know, there's all kinds of really interesting stories about things that are better than others. There are a lot of studies on people not liking the taste of chlorine, and that's a common way that we encourage people to treat their water. There's a lot of studies on filters, and people sometimes break them because they're slow. They break them to make the water flow faster, which of course defeats the purpose of the filter. There's a lot of good information out there, and I'm happy to look it up and share it with the particular person if they want to contact me. Great. Yeah, those are really interesting stories that you just shared. Another question we have are on metering water use. What are your thoughts on that? How does this factor into the longevity of the system? What was the first part on what... water meters and using them? Water meters? Oh, yeah. I'm a big fan. I think if you're looking at especially like a gravity flow system, I actually did some research on this in Central America with the Global Water Initiative. They were finding that meters were really improving the services for piped water systems that were gravity-fed. So for example, in a really silly area, the people who lived farther up the hills weren't getting as much water pressure and so they didn't get water 24-7 and the people who lived in the lower areas were. Water meters help you detect leaks in the system. They help you be fairer about your fees rather than a flat B for everyone. You can charge people based on their use, which a lot of times is a lot more fair because some people might use the water, as we mentioned earlier, for their animals or for farming and other people might just use it for household. So meters are they have a lot of good reasons for being used. However, there's a lot of information on prepaid meters not being that great. Especially in South Africa. So I have a couple of blogs on meters that have some good resource links in there as well that I can share, but generally I'm a big fan. So there's a there are known relationships between energy and water. Have you identified these links in the water systems you analyzed? Oh gosh, energy and water. That's not an area that I focus on that much but in general you know it's pretty interesting just big picture it takes water to make energy and it takes energy sometimes to get your water out of the ground. So yeah, that's not an area I'm as knowledgeable about but it's certainly critical. Would you recommend charging people on their use even or a hand pump? Has there been any research on this? What are your thoughts on it? Charging people do, is that what you said? I think what Julia is charging people on their I think I need more detail on this question so we're going to skip over it a little bit but yeah, so right now we're at the 12 o'clock point so we're going to kind of close out and yeah, thank you so much Susan, thank you so much to the E4C team and yes have a great day everyone. Thank you Sophia, thanks all of you for participating.