The Technology Applicability Framework. A Participatory Tool to Validate Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Technologies for Low-Income Urban Areas

Abstract

Biography: André Olschewski has a professional background in rural engineering, business engineering and spatial planning. He has over 18 years of working experience as consultant and project manager in the area of environmental engineering, strategic planning and project management of infrastructure projects. He is currently working as water and environmental sanitation specialist at Skat Consulting. In the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) he is engaged as thematic coordinator for accelerating Self-supply. Abstract Practitioners in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector can draw upon a number of different technology options when delivering water supply, sanitation and hygiene services in urban or peri-urban areas. At the same time, there is a serious challenge facing producers, practitioners, communities, governments and development partners whereby the services introduced, struggle to remain in operation or perform optimally for sufficient lengths of time to truly meet user needs. The WASH sector is currently faced with a situation where lessons learned in pilots are not widely transferred. There is little or no feedback loop from communities to producers and implementers of some widely used WASH technologies. Many countries do not have policies or standards in place for assessment and uptake of new WASH technologies, resulting in arbitrary adoption of options that are not fit for purpose, too expensive for users to pay for, not scalable and inadequately supported at local level.