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Gemma Kite glk34@cornell.edu
May 5, 2008
Written for IARD 603: Planning and Management of Rural and Agricultural Development Projects

Introduction

AguaClara is a project coordinated through the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Cornell University, and engages multidisciplinary students and faculty. The mission statement of the organization is to improve drinking water quality through innovative research, knowledge transfer, and design of sustainable and scalable water treatment systems (AguaClara). AguaClara water treatment plants are designed to treat turbid surface waters at the municipal scale, built using local materials, and operated without electricity. AguaClara partners with local institutions who build, operate, train, transfer, oversee, and monitor the water treatment plants to ensure long term sustainability.
Diarrheal diseases from easily preventable causes claim the lives of approximately 5000 young children throughout the world every day. Sufficient and better quality drinking water and basic sanitation reduce this toll dramatically (UNICEF). Distributing untreated surface waters as drinking water is one of the causes of waterborne disease. Point of use and municipal scale treatment schemes are two potential solutions. In recent years, conventional municipal water treatment and supply systems have been seen as an unsustainable and expensive strategy for providing safe drinking water in low-income communities in underdeveloped countries. This conclusion is based on the failure of conventional technologies, developed for use in the first world, that have been inserted in third world settings, which lack ready access to supply chains, trained technicians, and sufficient capital.

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Currently, AguaClara technology has been implemented in Ojojona, Honduras, with a municipal scale water treatment plant serving 2,000 people. Two more plants are under construction in the Honduran towns of Marcala and Tamara, with populations of 5,400 and 3,500 respectively. AguaClara plants have a one-time construction and capacity-building cost of less than $20 per person. The monthly fee for operation and maintenance is approximately $1 per family. With the help of Agua Para el Pueblo, a Honduran Non Government Agency (NGO), AguaClara technology has proven successful at producing potable water from turbid surface water.

The future of AguaClara

AguaClara is hopeful that their designs and technology will continue to be implemented in many regions throughout Honduras, and even branch into different countries and continents. In order to be able to promote AguaClara technology, the project has an open-source engineering foundation, understanding that sharing knowledge, design, and ideas is an important step to bringing potable water to everyone around the world. Additionally, the students are working on an automated design tool that will enable partner organizations to obtain detailed design documentation including 3-D CAD drawings of an AguaClara plant that is customized to the population, flow rate, and size of local materials that will be used for construction.

Before advancing AguaClara technology throughout various regions of the world, students question how going global can be done successfully. This includes building AguaClara treatment plants with local NGO support, incorporating participatory involvement from the villagers, and maintaining observation and technical support after completion of construction. All of these efforts need to be coordinated, but whether they are by one facilitator or many different key players, how the future of AguaClara plays out is a viable concern for many of the stakeholders in the organization.

Learning process versus blueprint approach

Currently, the AguaClara approach includes slow, thoughtful choices and decisions based on the outcome of previous work. For example, the AguaClara plant in Ojojona was inaugurated in January 2007 after construction was complete. Over the past year, two former Cornell students were hired as AguaClara interns to work in Honduras and monitor previously built plants as well as future project sites. Through the interns' and the AguaClara community partners' support, AguaClara has been able to observe the existing plant's function and progress in the Ojojona community. Meanwhile, the design and research teams have made several changes to implement in future plants, and will hopefully be installed into the existing plants if it accessible. This type of controlled project progress is called the learning process approach.

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Taking AguaClara global is an initiative that requires a lot of coordination, and thoughtful decision making. The automated design tool will be available to anyone in the world that has access to internet, making the AguaClara technology extremely handy and a powerful instrument. An influential technology tool will not treat turbid water alone, as it also takes community coordination and participation, organization of local NGOs, and other key players to successfully run an AguaClara treatment plant. While the actual AguaClara technology can be considered to be dispersed using a blueprint approach, the actual success of the project depends on several other factors not conducive to a quick and easy, de-humanified process. Even as AguaClara goes global, it should consider the benefits of the adaptive learning process approach.

Technology is adapted, not transferred

The AguaClara technology has been catered to Honduras, thus far. The treatment plants work well for the characteristics of the water found locally. When this technology is used for various communities around the world, special construction, geographical, cultural, and social implications will have to be considered. In this regard, technology is never transferrable, because it implies that the technology cannot be changed. AguaClara technology, however, can be adapted to various parts of the world to ensure that the project will be technically successful at treating water as well as being culturally accepted.

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While it is important to be able to share the knowledge and design tools worldwide, the powerful AguaClara technology needs to be properly adapted to new project sites, which can't happen in a quick and de-humanified blueprint approach. Additionally, it needs to be understood that the key to successful rural development includes the land, the labor, and the capital, or in the AguaClara case, not just the technology, but the organization of local NGOs, the participation of community members, and responsible parties that monitor the development of the AguaClara project.

Expansion ideas

AguaClara can not continue to find donors, monitor design and research, facilitate construction, and conduct a year long monitoring for each plant if the project intends to spread globally. There are a lot of tasks involved in the project and all of them are integral to its success. The main reason that AguaClara has been so successful with rural development is because it has considered all of these factors. So, while all tasks must remain in the scope of the AguaClara project, they will have to be distributed among other trusted players.

While the team is still discussing management approaches, it is important to remember that organization and participation is absolutely key to going global. In previously studied agricultural and rural development projects, smaller committees comprised of community members and NGO representatives were formed to oversee different parts of the project. "Small organizations by themselves may be beautiful, but their impact will be limited if they are not joined in some larger enterprise" (Uphoff, 67). For AguaClara, there is a strong need to organize a hierarchical structure "that is animated from below even more than from above" (Uphoff, 67). While the AguaClara team can provide overall design and technical support, and a higher managerial component, the bulk of the work should be thought out by, organized by, and implemented by small committees. Ideally, each town would have one committee each for construction, maintenance, and evaluation. These town committees would be supported by a network of an inter-village committee and from NGO's like APP. Above this would be any support by government agencies or country committee, which would be in communication to the AguaClara team. While this is just a framework of how the AguaClara global project could be managed, many more details need to be figured out in order to achieve participatory management.

Financial considerations

An important consideration for project expansion is financial responsibility. The student-run group fundraises enough to build the plants in the communities. If the project expands to fabricating multiple plants in a year, however, the group will be overwhelmed with raising funds and will spend less time on the technology aspect and improving the design. Even now, there are financial issues within the communities that are affecting the efficiency of the plant and need to be addressed in order to expand the project.

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Not only does this "son and daughter mill" fund scheme provoke the community members to contribute more to their own plant, but this plan is conducive to horizontal project expansion. The people being serviced by the AguaClara plants would have to pay more than they do currently, but it is with the intention to help other surrounding communities benefit from clean water. Especially since a community would receive a fund to build their AguaClara plant from another town, giving back to a different community is a way to continue to support the project. If AguaClara were to adapt this type of funding scheme, the organization would have natural proponents of the project, as people will want to ensure that their "daughter mill" fund will go to an appropriate community through meetings and other social interactions. Consequently, the community members from one town could train the members at the next town on construction, maintenance, and operation of the plants. Most importantly, AguaClara would not have to continue to rely heavily on outside donors nor focus large efforts on project expansion in nearby communities, as the "daughter and son mill" funding scheme would benefit both areas. There are other potentially good funding schemes that would install more community ownership and require less focus on outside donors that could be evaluated, as both will increase the sustainability of the AguaClara project, including less involvement from upper management and more focus on the local people.

Conclusions

This evaluation was by no means comprehensive of all of the factors that contribute to the AguaClara project. Before AguaClara can go global, a re-evaluation of the current progress in Honduras will give the team helpful insights into how to cultivate a more successful development project, especially with respect to cultural and social values. Installing the AguaClara technology is only effective with help from local organizations, participation of community members, and creative management.

For the future of AguaClara, the project must maintain a learning process approach to building new plants, while being able to direct certain tasks to other key players. Just as financial considerations are important to understand and consider, there are also social aspects to the AguaClara project that should be evaluated. Such aspects include an easier method to survey community members, understanding community participation and the interaction with local leadership, and the social capital involved. After all, AguaClara is not just a drinking water treatment plant, it is educating a population on proper sanitation, on sustainable water use practices, and empowering a community to be able to drink their own water and be proud of this freedom.

Sources

AguaClara Wiki
UNICEF. "Water for Life." World Health Organization. 2005.
<http://www.unicef.org/wes/files/JMP_2005.pdfImage Added>
Uphoff, N., Esman, M. J., Krishna, A. Reasons for Success. Kumarian Press: 1998