Associate Professor. Director, Undergraduate Studies, School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). Associate Director, Center for the Future of Work Places and Practices
On Thursday, March 27, Dr. Eric Vance and I will be giving an MCC webinar to explain some of the main findings from our impact evaluation of the MCC-funded Rural Water Supply Activity (RWSA) in Nampula, Mozambique. The slides for this webinar can be accessed below.
In the video below, Eric Vance and I are joined by several of our graduate students to describe how we developed the concept of an “on-the-ground statistician” to advance our data collection and cleaning practices in relation to large-scale household surveys.
UAP 5324 / BSE 4394, 2013 Spring Semester
Instructor: Dr. Ralph Hall
Meets: Tuesdays 12:30pm to 3:15pm
Location: Architecture Annex 111
In this course, we will examine the planning process for the provision of water supply and sanitation (W&S) services in developing countries. The course is structured to provide both an engineering and policy perspective on the subject. Thus, the readings, class discussions, and assignments will require students to think as both an engineer and planner/analyst. The course will begin with a review of the state of water and sanitation services in different parts of the world and will raise the question of what constitutes access to water. Following this introduction, we will study the design of important W&S technologies. We will then examine the broader environmental and public health considerations in water W&S planning. Armed with an understanding of critical W&S issues and technologies, in the final section of the course we will examine key ideas/topics such as multiple-use water services, demand-oriented planning, service pricing, decentralization vs. centralization of W&S services, community participation in the planning process, and post-construction support.
Having successfully completed this course you will be able to:
1. Describe the current level of access to, and the quality of, water supply and sanitation services in one or more developing regions.
2. Outline the planning process for the provision of water supply and sanitation services in the developing region(s) studied.
3. Define the various roles of local, national, and international agencies and donors in the provision of water supply and sanitation services in developing regions.
4. Use planning-based tools to evaluate existing and proposed water supply and sanitation services in the developing region(s) studied.
5. Design policies and/or infrastructure to address identified problems with the provision/adequacy of existing water supply and sanitation services in the developing region(s) studied.
The presentation I gave during the seminar on “Scaling Pathways for Multiple-Use Services, for Food Security and Health” at the Stockholm World Water Week 2012 is posted below. Following this prezi, I have provided links to the presentations given by the other seminar participants.
Presentations by Seminar Participants
Background to MUS.
Barbara van Koppen, Coordinator MUS Group/IWMI, South Africa
MUS Practices and Scaling Pathways for Food Security in Ethiopia.
Deres Abdulkadir, RiPPLE, Ethiopia
What does MUS Look Like? Moving from Concept to Practice in 7 Countries.
Mary Renwick, Winrock International, USA
Guidelines for Providing and Implementing MUS.
Stef Smits, Secretary MUS Group/IRC, the Netherlands
If it is such a Good Idea, Why doesn’t Is Scale Up? Opportunities and Barriers for Scaling MUS.
Barbara van Koppen, coordinator MUS Group/IWMI, South Africa
On Friday, February 10, Sara Marks successfully passed the oral defense of her dissertation entitled “Water System Sustainability in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa: Participation, Sense of Ownership, and Performance.” Sara began her PhD while I was a postdoc at Stanford University and following my relocation to Virginia Tech, I became a member of her doctoral committee. An innovative component of Sara’s research is how she adapted and applied the idea of psychological ownership in the rural water sector. Over the past two decades, many researchers have associated the performance of rural water supply systems with a community’s sense of ownership for their system, but no research has been undertaken to try and quantify this phenomenon. Sara’s research provides an important contribution in this area and lays the foundation for a productive research career. Her main research findings will be published in a series of papers that should be available later this year.
The photos of Sara (below) were taken in Senegal in 2009, when she was supporting a research project on the productive use of domestic water in rural communities.
Over the past two months, I have presented some results from our water-related research in Senegal and Kenya to the Multiple-Use Water Services Group, and Mozambique to the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). I have provided a version of these presentations below for your interest, but have removed any sensitive information that could be used to identify the communities included in the studies or impact the integrity of the ongoing impact evaluation in Mozambique. We are currently working on a series of papers to document our findings from these large-scale empirical research projects. As soon as these papers are available, I will provide a link to them on this website.
“Productive Use of Domestic Rural Water Systems: The Senegal Case.” Presentation to the Multiple Use Water Services Group in Washington, D.C., January 19, 2012.
“Productive Use of Domestic Rural Water Systems: The Kenya Case.” Presentation to the Multiple Use Water Services Group in Washington, D.C., January 19, 2012.
“Results from the Baseline Study of the MCC-Funded Rural Water Supply Activity in Nampula.” Research team presentation to the Department of Policy and Evaluation, Millennium Challenge Corporation, December 15, 2011.
Ralph P Hall 