In somewhat random fashion, I had a meeting yesterday afternoon with Teddy Acunas, his brother Christian, and Bethany Foran. All three are affiliated with EWB University of Portland, which currently has two projects on the table. The first is developing a rainwater harvesting system for the village of Agua Negra in Guatemala, and the second is a drainage system for the village of Guadalupe Carney in Nicaragua. My understanding is that they have enough manpower, and funding, to become involved with a third project. I’m excited to connect with them further as, although we have a number of big thinkers on the ODA team, we don’t have much engineering talent. EWB University of Portland could be a good source for this.
Archive for the 'Partners' Category
We’re finally getting going on the water project in San Pablo. As Jason mentioned, at a meeting with the mayor of the province of San Pablo, we got a copy of a study that CARE had done in San Pablo. It was a survey of all of the existing water infrastructures in the province, as well as surveying the management and social issues: Which communities have strong water committees? How many people wash hands? use latrines? etc. It is pretty complete on rating the funcionality of existing water structures, but does not have any information about the communities without existing water infrastructure.
Then, this week, Rafael Escobar, the leader of ITDG here in Cajamarca, and I went to meet with CARE to talk to them about water in San Pablo, so that we as least don’t duplicate efforts, and at best, can collaborate. It turns out that they are working with the provincial and regional government to develop a plan for water management — both for potable water and other water uses. They would like to work with ITDG on such a larger water program in San Pablo. In the next 4-6 months ITDG will be developing a whole integrated province-wide proposal for electricity, water and economic development in the area. In the meanwhile, we can get going on the smaller water project in one or several communities with ODA. This project with ODA will be a model for the other projects.
So, now we need to identify what exactly that project will be. On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, I’ll be going to San Pablo with Rafael, Walter and Liliana, all Peruvians who work for ITDG to identify a community to start with. We’ll also be identifying a community for a small wind project, installing a 500 watt wind turbine for a school, so there is a chance that both projects could occur in the same community. So, by the end of next week we should finally have some more information. During this first trip, we won’t be doing the house-to-house detailed needs assesment, but will take into the broader factors of need and opportunity. For the next trip, it would be great if ODA could refine that needs assessment tool that you began to gathering examples for.
A while back, Green Empowerment (GE) sent us a diagnostic assessment that Solucciones Practicas did of the province of San Pablo where we hope to be working. Unfortunately, the document was in Spanish, and so we kept drawing straws to see which of the rusty Spanish speakers was going to have to read through and translate it. Luckily, I was assisted in this task by the tool Google has that, when emailed a PDF as an attachment, allows you to convert that PDF to HTML. After I converted the document to HTML, I put it through Google Translate in hopes of getting a comprehension aid, and what I got instead was a fully understandable (with effort) English translation. So, as I read Diagnostico, I mainly read the translation and looked through Diagnostico to see the pictures, graphs, etc. Though I have reasonably good Spanish skills, this is something that anyone could do. I’m amazed at the tools the internet, especially Google, has to offer.
On to the summary. As a quick background, this region (San Pablo) is roughly equivalent to a county, it is part of the larger state of Cajamarca, and contains the towns of San Pablo, San Luis, San Bernardino, and Tumbaden. The province has around 20,000 people, most of whom live in the town of San Pablo. The diagnostic concerned itself mainly with describing the culture, the economic activities, and the relevant organizations with the area. Also, throughout the document there was a focus on rates of, previous efforts at, organizations concerned with, and potential benefits of electrification, culminating in an assessment of various sites where electricity could be generated. This makes sense given that Solucciones Practicas is, to my understanding, mostly interested in doing an electrification project in San Pablo.
Regarding electrification, it seemed to me first that providing electricity would greatly benefit this province. Even beyond my first thought, that electricity could pump water and save people the time of moving it, electricity would allow for economic development beyond the current low-tech, agriculture and resource-gathering activities that comprise more than 90% of the local economy. Without electricity, the local dairy farmers are forced to sell to Nestle at whatever prices it demands, as Nestle has the only refrigerated storage in the area. Diagnostico identified a number of value-added industries, such as carpentry, that would be possible with electricity to power the machines. Even beyond this, electricity could help power the internet, thus opening people up to a world of free educational opportunities, and it could make life more pleasant, powering lights and electrical appliances. The author talked about a problem where many young people leave, and only ~50% of them return. Perhaps this could be stopped by providing better jobs, more education and more amenities.
The diagnostico also provided insight into the organizations in the area and how they could assist or hinder electrification and other development projects. It seems possible that we might be able to set up a relationship with the Peruvian government (at the federal level), because they have expressed goals of rural electrification, have made strides toward accomplishing this, and continue to have agencies and funds for this purpose. However, I don’t know what other obstacles might stand in the way of such a relationship, but this does seem to be a worthwhile lead to explore since the federal government could undoubtedly marshal a large amount of resources to help us.
At the local level of government, it is clear that there is a complex web of relationships. There are non-elected (I believe) governors, along with elected lieutenant governors and mayors, who have overlapping responsibilities and don’t always get along. For instance, the governors don’t work well with the mayors of Tumbaden or San Bernardino, the author suggests that this could be because of political jealousy. Now, I don’t imagine the situation is much different or worse than it is in any representative democracy. I’m simply going to assume that, in this area, there is a complex bureaucracy. If we try to work with them, it would likely be in our best interests to enlist a local who knows the system.
The most promising groups, in my mind, are the very local government groups and the civic organizations. There is apparently a group of elected officials called the Peasant Patrols, who help with projects around the town. There is also a great number of organizations with economic purposes, such as the Association of Agricultural Producers, who could bring together many of the local farmers. Then there are service organizations, some of which help the poor and others who help with education and health. They could be very helpful when we decide to run educational programs on clean water and sanitation.
It is clear from reading Diagnostico that there is great good that can be done here, and many groups who could help us do it.
As of Friday night at around 6 PM PST, our very first grant application has been submitted. ”An Open Source of Water for Peru” was the title Isaac at Squarepeg helped propose. Many thanks to him, Jason at Green Empowerment, and the rest of the ODA team for helping to pull this together so quickly. Without everyone’s creativity, critical thinking, and wiliness to GTD, the application wouldn’t have been written on such short notice. Here’s to the possibility of $10,000 coming our way!
Even if we don’t win the money, though, taking the time to answer the questions for both components of the Clinton Global Initiative commitment and grant process proved to be a valuable experience. The prompts forced us to think deeply about who we are and what we’re trying to do, as well as provide specifics on how we hope to accomplish it. The format in which we synthesized this, too, makes the grant application a valuable read for anyone that wants to come on board with the team and our projects.
If you’re a member of the Clinton Foundation’s MyCommitments website, please do vote our project up. I would imagine the voting system does indeed count for something.
The Clinton Global Initiative - Outstanding Commitment Awards are a series of $10,000 to $250,000 awards from President Clinton for student projects addressing these areas: energy and climate change, global health, human rights and peace, and poverty alleviation. We feel Oregon Direct Action and its projects fit this criteria well, and Shane, Hannah, and I been drafting our responses to the prompts over the last week.
We need readers!
If you’re interested in proofing our application, please download the draft [DOC] and either comment on the file and send it back to us, or leave your general comments on this post. Specifically, we’re looking for feedback on overall presentation of ideas and how well we address each question. If you find gritty grammar mistakes, though, please point those out too. Originally, the due date was supposed to be the 28th of July, although the website now says entries must be submitted by the 4th of August. In any case, we hope to submit this as soon as we can.
If you’d like to subscribe to updates from Oregon Direct Action with either RSS or Email, there are now a few stellar ways to do so. We’ve broken down how the updates we write get sent out, in the hope that, when you subscribe, you only get information that is relevant to you. With this strategy, everyone that is interested in working with us can be engaged to the degree they want to.
According to Wikipedia, a “feed” is a “data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.” In layman’s terms, this means that when a piece of content is published, you receive it in whatever inbox you would like (instead of having to continually go back to the publisher’s website). We’re hoping this offers a hassle-free way for the ODA community to keep updated on what’s going on. Read what we write about when it’s delivered to you, and if you have something to contribute, leave a comment on that post.
Let me make this a bit more concrete. At the moment, we have four tiers of feeds, this metaphorical river channel of information:
- Updates for Everyone - These are posts we write which are the broadest of updates, like this one, that we think are relevant to everyone interested in what’s going on with Oregon Direct Action. As an example, these posts might include monthly project updates, large events, and whenever we have super huge news to announce.
- Updates for our Community - For our community at the University of Oregon and around our projects, we intend to write posts of a bit more comprehensive nature. They might also include news relevant to the community, and opportunities for different members of the community to get involved.
- Updates for our Partners - These are posts geared towards our partners, including findings in our research and ideas or opportunities directly related to our projects. As a note, this feed also includes a summary of ODA-relevant links saved with our del.icio.us account, reports, podcasts, and tools we find and think will be useful.
- Updates for the Team - High-frequency updates from the different parts of the team intended to keep all of us up-to-date on what’s going on. Ideally, this feed will take the place of email, for the most part. Currently, this also includes links from our del.icio.us account and all audio podcasts.
As time goes on, the way that these feeds are structured, and the types of content they receive, will most likely evolve significantly. We’re making this strategy up as we go along and, as far as we can tell, no one has ever done something like this before. Conceptually, we’re solid on the idea on “crowdsourcing” as much of our projects as we can, but how we actually do this is bound to have a few rough edges. Any and all feedback is warmly welcomed.
One thing to note is that you should only need to subscribe to one feed. With how we’re planning on structuring this, everything that gets published in “Community Updates” will also be received by the team and our partners, but not by “everyone.” The feeds will also have tiers of frequency, with “Updates for our Team” having the highest traffic and “Updates for Everyone” having the lowest.
Cool. On with the show.
Update: I almost forgot. Thanks to DJ Strouse of EWB USC and all others with the open source organization quasi-working group for helping map out this and upcoming strategies.
This is a summary of what I’ve accomplished so far.
What was the goal?
We are currently looking for information, ideally from scholarly or published sources, about reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives as part of a large sustainable development project, and about public health assessments following rural water improvement projects in Latin America.
What did we find?
On the subject of sustainable development:
- The Watershed Organization Trust is a group working in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, India to provide sustainable development. Though they don’t seem to do much with aquifer recharge, they do work to increase the quality of the local watershed through reforestation and education. Here is a link to a detailed paper on their work, and here is a link to their articles page, where they have many more publications on their work.
- The United Nations Division on Sustainable Development published a report of case studies on sustainable development in Africa.
- I found a report for a project in Venezuela that attempted sustainable development through encouraging rural farmers to grow organic coffee in the shade and reforestation initiatives. Unfortunately, the report is in Spanish so I can’t read it, but I would encourage anyone who can to do so, because it seems like a valuable report.
On the subject of public health assessments, the best papers I’ve found were the following:
- Interventions to improve water quality for preventing diarrhoea: systematic review and meta-analysis - This article examines data from various studies and looks at the effectiveness of various water projects in reducing diarrhoea.
- Reducing Diarrhea Though The Use Of Household-based Ceramic Water Filters: A Randomized, Controlled Trial In Rural Bolivia - This article describes a study in which half of the households in a rural community in Bolivia receive ceramic water filters. The result is a marked decrease in the occurrence of diarrhoea.
- Household-based Ceramic Water Filters For The Prevention Of Diarrhea: A Randomized, Controlled Trial Of A Pilot Program In Columbia - A similar study by the same journal that takes place in Columbia instead of Bolivia.
How did we find it?
Google Scholar was my main source for finding information on public health assessments, probably because there are many papers on that subject. Still, props to Google for creating a resource that allows quality information to be so easily accessible.
For the papers on sustainable development, I had to be a bit more creative. The first thing I did was call the U of O Libraries and get my account working so I could use U of O’s research tools. There’s a lot of sources of information there, and U of O does a pretty good (though not the best) job of allowing you to use them easily. One thing that bothered me was that a lot of resources, such as ScienceDirect, are IP based, so you have to actually be in the library to use them.
Still, I would encourage anyone to look into your university research resources if you’re a student. Your tuition dollars are paying for some high quality tools.
Those tools found me some decent articles, however, I felt like I really began to tap into a gold mine when I began searching for sustainable development blogs. These are sites from people like us (after all, this is a sustainable development blog), many of whom have implemented projects and have valuable lessons to share.
What’s next?
The plan now is to find more sustainable development blogs, to post them, and then to comb through the best of them for detailed reports of actual projects. I also want to find analysis of projects, in terms of lessons learned, problems encountered, and ways they plan to address these problems the next time they go into the field. Also, as we find blogs, we are finding potential partners who we can contact and work together with.
For the community:
So, to all of you reading this, I have some questions/requests:
- How do you feel about this research summary? Did I go too in depth or not deep enough? How do you like my format (ie. “what was the goal,” “what did we find” etc.)?
- Is there anything I’ve mentioned here that you’d like to know more about?
- Do you have sources of information and research tools that you would suggest?
- Do you know of blogs/organizations that relate to what we’re working on?
I have been officially delegated to be head of research for ODA by Daniel, the man who long ago officially delegated unto himself the officially delegate powers…
Anyway, in this position, I’ll be the go-to guy when we need to find out about something. However, there’s a lot more to my job than that. I also try to figure out what we should be researching, I work with others so we can help each other out when researching, I record the fruits of our research, and I blog about this whole process so that members of the ODA community can see what we’re up to, learn from us, and maybe chip in and help us with our research.
With that in mind, I’ll be blogging regular research posts that you can track if you want. In this first post, I’ll talk about progress we’ve made in helping our partners, GE (Green Empowerment, not General Electric), find the following:
- papers or publications exist on reforestation and aquifer recharge/restoration initiatives that have been tied to meeting local human and agricultural demands for water
- papers on water projects (within the last 10 years) that have been paired with public health assessments in Latin America for communities with 20-100 households
I began to search first for papers that paired health assessments with water projects, utilizing Google Scholar. An immediate problem I ran into was that most publishers want you to pay for their articles, offering only abstracts for free. I kept track of promising abstracts, figuring that GE could look them over and see if any were worth paying for. I was able to overcome this problem, however, because most articles gave links to similar articles, and so I was able to quickly look into a large number of good articles and find a few that were free. I’m going to keep track of the pages that offer free articles and eventually create a page of good sources for research that all can look at and add to.
In addition to these articles, I also remembered that a friend of mine, DJ Strouse, is working on a similar water project in India and one of the things they’ll be doing is installing a software system that improves patient health by giving clinicians the ability to keep patient records electronically. However, this system also collects data on health trends in areas where it’s installed. Global Medical Brigades, one of DJ’s partners in this project, is the organization that provides this software, called the “GWB Data Informatics System.”
I then began to search, again using Google Scholar, for papers on reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives, hoping to find some that also mentioned water needs, or rural areas in developing countries. I wasn’t able to find anything promising that was free, and little at all, money or no. I plan to continue searching tomorrow.
Before I end, I have a few requests for all of you:
- What are good sources of information? I’m thinking especially of sites that offer free journals/scholarly articles, but also of environmental/humanitarian blogs/news sites, good blogs/news sits in general, or even other groups that might have information that could help us with this current task, or our overall task of improving the lives people around the world through the provision of water and energy.
- If you’d like, feel free to join me in the search for papers on the aforementioned subjects by linking to resources in the comments or tagging them with “for:oregondirectaction” with del.icio.us
Thanks!
DJ Strouse, of USC’s Hubli Water and Health Project, wrote a whiz-bag summary of Urs Heierli’s “Marketing Safe Water Systems” that I passed along to him the other day. He’s apparently a quicker reader than I, and more focused with his time. All the power to him, I’m only halfway through. In his assessment, DJ highlights these points:
- Central idea: Don’t treat poor people like poor people. They want to be marketed to just like everyone else.
- Recommendation one: Don’t ignore marketing. Use “local leaders, teachers, celebrities, and pop culture to promote a branded product.” Why? Because lifestyle marketing is a proven method of selling products.
- Recommendation two: Understand the local culture. This ties into the marketing concept above; if you’re planning on “selling” your SODIS, BioSand, or other purification system to a population, you had better make a case for why they want it and how it makes their lives easier.
- Conclusion: Understanding a region well enough to introduce a desirable water filter is the next challenge for NGOs working to provide safe and reliable water access
With that being said, the report, or at least as far as I’ve gotten, offers valuable insights and real-world examples to back up these conclusions. It’s a relatively easy read, too. What did you learn from it?
MAPLE Microfinance, an initiative of the University’s International Business and Economics Club, is launching a microfinance project in Northern Uganda. Currently, there are two students in-country with Professor Ron Severson to get the lending institution off its feet.
What I’m stoked about, however, is that those two students (whom I’ve never met) are blogging about their experiences, and the developments in the program:
It will be sweet to see how their team progresses, and how we might be able to work together in the fall.