Assessing the Implementation of Selected Household Water Treatment and Safe Storage Methods in Emergency Settings, 2011.
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Daniele Lantagne, Thomas Clasen. London School of Hygieneand Tropical Medicine
We were commissioned by UNICEF and Oxfam to undertake this study to address two overarching questions:
- 1) What role, if any, should household water treatment and safe storage (HWTS) play in emergency response (in other words, is HWTS a necessary, effective, and suitable intervention for protecting people affected by emergencies compared to other possible interventions)?; and,
- 2) What are the factors, if any, associated with feasible, and potentially sustained, implementation of HWTS in response to emergencies (e.g., type of emergency, characteristics of setting and affected population, capacity of responders, types of interventions, nature of programmatic support)?
We focused particularly on evaluating HWTS interventions implemented in the acute emergency context, within eight weeks of emergency onset.
To answer these questions, we investigated HWTS implementations in four acute emergency contexts between August2009 and March 2010, including:
- 1) a cholera outbreak in Jajarkot, Nepal;
- 2) an earthquake in West Sumatra,Indonesia;
- 3) a flooding event during a cholera epidemic in Turkana, Kenya; and,
- 4) an earthquake that causedsignificant internal displacement in Haiti.
These emergencies represented a diverse range of emergency situations, geographical settings, affected population size, and HWTS implementation strategy. In each emergency we conducted the following activities:
- 1) spatial analysis;
- 2) household surveys;
- 3) water quality testing;
- 4) qualitative interviews with water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) responders and logistical staff; and,
- 5) data collection to characterize response costs.
