Dear Elisabeth,

According to OECD, Informal settlements are:
1. areas where groups of housing units have been constructed on land that the occupants have no legal claim to, or occupy illegally;
2. unplanned settlements and areas where housing is not in compliance with current planning and building regulations (unauthorized housing).
Refugee camps or settlements would not come under this category because a camp is a authorized unit set up the host government to receive refugees . How can it be called 'informal'?

Regards,
Shobana

Dear Shobana and all,

Yes, true. But in my post I didn't say that refugee camps are "informal". The reason why I said I would "lump together" an informal settlement and a refugee camp for the purposes of filtering the project database is because the technologies and sanitation systems used are often similar, e.g. they are usually communal/shared facilities, rather than individual toilets in the houses/huts/tents. Also, they usually have to be low cost and may be of a temporary nature. They might also be mobile, in the case of container-based sanitation ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-based_sanitation ).

But if you prefer we can also add a separate filter option called "Refugee camps" (under "setting").
The filter options could then look like this:

Filter by setting or users
- Rural
- Peri-Urban
- Urban (entire city)
- Schools
- Urban informal settlements
- Refugee camps
- Others

Would people find that helpful?

If you want to check which of the 300 projects currently deal with emergency sanitation / refugee camps you can filter it by Working Group 8 (Emergency Sanitation) which gives these 5 projects only:
www.susana.org/en/resources/projects?vbl...5D=&vbl_8%5B45%5D=45

I am sure there are many more interesting projects that SuSanA partners are carrying out in emergency sanitation settings, so it would be nice if people included them in the project database. If you work for an organisation that is a SuSanA partner, you can add your own projects to the database; just tell the secretariat that your SuSanA login needs additional editing rights).
If your organisation is not a SuSanA partner, you can still have your project added by the secretariat if you tell them to add it.

Note that in the new website which will be re-launched middle of July, the project database and its filtering and sorting functions will be given a much more prominent and easier to understand spot. (see here: forum.susana.org/10-announcements-regard...ce-study-into-action )

Regards,
Elisabeth

OK, so after further discussions within the team (e.g. inputs from Diane, Shobana, Ruth, Esther, Arno) we have now come up with the following filter options for the project database. Good filter options are paramount for people to find exactly what they are looking for in the project database; note that filters can also be combined in "and" and "or" fashion.

Here is the project database: www.susana.org/en/resources/projects . Right now we have 322 projects in there.

I should stress that this is not meant to be a scientifically correct classification system of sanitation projects. Rather it is meant to reflect what we currently have in this project database and make it easier to find what you're interested in.

So here are the proposed new or modified filters and their new or modified filter options:

Filter by project focus
- Toilets or urinals (user interface)
- Emptying and transport (non sewered)
- Treatment
- Resource recovery
- Faecal sludge management (FSM)
- Enabling environment and institutional strengthening * (would anyone prefer to see this split in two?)
- Others

Filter by treatment technology or system
- Biogas systems
- Composting, vermicomposting (solid waste)
- Constructed wetlands
- Container based systems (CBS)
- Decentralised wastewater treatment (e.g. DEWATS)
- Faecal sludge treatment
- Fundamental research and engineering
- Urine diversion dehydration toilets (UDDTs)
- Vermifilters (liquid waste)
- Others

Filter by setting or users
- Camps (emergency or longer term)
- Peri-urban
- Rural
- Schools
- Urban (entire city)
- Urban informal settlements (slums)
- Others

Filter by beneficial product
- Energy: biogas
- Energy: electricity
- Energy: fuel
- Fertiliser
- Protein for animal food
- Other

Filter by materials to be reused
- Faeces
- Greywater or wastewater
- Urine
- Other

Filter by audience of project’s publications
- Educators
- Practitioners
- Journalists
- Others

Filter by sanitation topic * (this one follows mostly the titles of the SuSanA Working Groups, with WG 4 and WG 7 split into two)
- Capacity development
- Market development
- Renewable energies and climate change
- Technology comparisons
- Health and hygiene
- Food security and productive sanitation
- Cities
- Rural
- Community sanitation
- Emergency and reconstruction
- Public awareness, advocacy and civil society engagement
- Operation, maintenance and sustainable services
- Groundwater protection
- WASH and nutrition
- Behaviour change
- Product design and engineering
- Political processes and institutional aspects
- Others

Filter by funding source
Same as before but we added this one:
- Multi-lateral and International Monetary Fund

Filter by grant recipient
- Government-owned entity
- International NGO
- Local NGO / not for profit entity
- Multilateral organisation
- Profit making entity / private sector
- University or research institution
- Others

Filter by geographical reach
- Global
- Specific to one or several countries


Keep in mind that we've generall set up the filter options so each will yield one or several results in our project database. When the category "other" gets too big then that can be split it up further. For this reason, we don't have a filter option for e.g. "deworming" as there are no deworming projects in our database yet. If we got some projects on that topic, we could add that as a further filter option in future.

Any comments?

Oh, and I just wanted to re-iterate that in the re-launched website (coming this month), the project database and the filter options will be more prominent and more intuitive. So stay tuned.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Dear Elisabeth,

I understand that the filters/topics reflect those of the projects in the database, but there is a heavy bias on a technology/infrastructure classification. I miss the S of SuSanA - which projects focus on financial, institutional, environmental, technological and/or social sustainability, the FIETS approach wash-alliance.org/our-approach/sustainability/ . Which projects focus on one or more building blocks for sustainable service delivery? IRC is currently developing building blocks for sanitation, similar to those we already have for rural water supply ( www.ircwash.org/resources/reimagining-ru...rvices-future-agenda ). Examples of building blocks are: asset management, post construction support, capacity support to local government, regulation - in short all elements that are needed to keep a sanitation service up and running for everyone, everywhere.

Cor

Dear Cor,

Good point. - I didn't fully understand these two sentences though, I think they got a bit scrambled up:

Which projects focus one or building blocks for sustainable service delivery? IRC is currently the building blocks developed for rural water supply

Could you please clarify?

Arno recently made a similar suggestion to me but my reply to him was how can we or anyone judge where to put the filter ticks? Isn't it very subjective with the result being that everyone project owner would "claim" that his or her project fulfilled all the sustainability criteria?

Another suggestion by Arno was to have filters along the line of the functional sanitation ladder:



Again, I said it would be very hard to make that judgement call. In the past, most of the projects were actually added by the SEI team and they were mostly BMGF grant projects. Sometimes we had very little information to go by when setting up the ticks for the filters. So it would have been impossible to judge the projects on those parameters.

Maybe this will change now when more SuSanA partners add their own projects. Perhaps we could test it out a little bit: maybe we could take 10 or 20 projects by IRC and add to them to the database and try out the new filters that you propose? It gets interesting when the filters help to narrow down the search but not if each project ticks all the filters anyhow.

I am keen to hear your thoughts on this.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Hi Elisabeth,

Sorry for the confusion, indeed words were missing. I have made some edits, which hopefully provide some clarity.

Regarding sustainability criteria, you would need to have access to the project monitoring framework. Such frameworks often include mandatory sustainability requirements from the donor, and are more common for implementation projects, rather than for research projects. For technology development/innovation projects, the Technology Applicability Framework (TAF) uses basically the same FIETS sustainability criteria (it has one additional one skills/capacities) and the accompanying Technology Introduction Process (TIP) available at www.washtechnologies.net/

I will ask my sanitation colleagues which IRC projects we could add to the SuSanA project database.