Project Zone

Epworth and Hopley farm are two settlements nearby Harare. About 80% of the inhabitants of these areas are “informal settlers”, which means that they do not have access to sewage or planned sanitation, electricity and water supply.Thus, these people mainly dig their own wells. Most people in these areas cannot afford to treat their water. Firewood to boil the water and chemicals to disinfect the water are too expensive to buy for regular water treatment. Most people report health problems related to the stomach and diarrhoea. Especially weak people (children, older people, sick people) suffer from the water situation.

Implementation Strategy

This project will be accompagny by the socio-psychological research department of EAWAG with the aim to test effect of different promotion strategies for SODIS.
From the people living in these areas (about 350 000 in Epworth and 30 000 in Hopley Farm), 5 000 households are targeted to be reached by promoters in three parts of the area, whereas 3 000 people in another two parts of the areas shall be reached by the self-diffusion strategy. Thus, a total number of 8 000 households shall be reached by the campaign.
Commitment is a strategy that makes people feel more obliged to their intention. This shall help to prevent people from not doing SODIS because of forgetting or, e.g., not being in the mood to do SODIS. Commitment includes different techniques that range from a simple poster with a help to recall doing SODIS up to letting people sign a contract where they state how much SODIS they are going to do in the future.
The pass-on-task is a method to enhance the self-diffusion of SODIS. Since self-diffusion could not be established in past projects, this method shall help to give an insight into whether it is possible to systematically bring SODIS “on its way” without much intervention. There will be a bottle centre established in the project areas where this self-diffusion shall take place. At the end of a first information event, people will receive a SODIS bottle and two tags. They will be asked to pass on this tag to a friend / neighbour /relative, etc., telling that person about SODIS. This tag can be used by the other person to receive a SODIS bottle and also two tags and so on. This could be a way of easily spreading SODIS into the whole project area.

Approaches

A participatory approach will be adopted for the project. The initial promotion strategies will be formulated using computer simulations after baseline interviews by EAWAG. These will be continually reviewed throughout the project to ensure the maximum uptake of SODIS. The promotion campaigns (which employ the single strategies to form complete campaigns) will be conducted in a culturally sensitive way, which is adapted to the habits and circumstances at hand.

Expected results/Achievements

The overall goal of the project is to enhance access to safe drinking water at household level through the practice of solar disinfection in the 8 000 households in Epworth and Hopley Farm that shall be reached with the project.

In addition, as the project is being implemented complimentarily to a research project assessing different factors supporting or constraining a possible self-diffusion of SODIS, a secondary goal of the project therefore is to generate increased knowledge on the effects of different promotion strategies.
The specific objectives are:

• Develop strategies, education and promotion materials for the promotion of SODIS.
• Train promoters on the implementation of the promotion strategies.
• Train minimum 8 000 potentially 16000 households using different sets of promotion and diffusion strategies.
• Establish a guaranteed PET bottle supply scheme in the project areas.
• Set up an information and dissemination network for SODIS
  
  

Lessons learnt

• The PET bottle supply must be carefully planned and supported. Depending on the economical situation, it can be difficult to get bottles.
• The promotors are very engaged and can tell a lot about the problems and the reactions of the users.
• We have to be careful, that the contact with the local leaders are not politically unbalanced. This would hinder people with another political opinion to participate.