Rural villages around the world lack reliable access to water and technology. Like a broken record, a common mistake made my aid groups that go into such communities is the failure to properly teach local groups how to properly care for, use, and integrate complex, expensive equipment. It breaks and becomes a physical reminder of broken promises.

Kayarani, a small village in Bolivia made up of subsistence farmers is one such example of a locality where past campaigns to improve sanitation has produced mixed results. The NGO Water for People is attempting to avoid previous mistakes by working with local community and government officials for effective engagement in building a sustainable water system and latrines.

A critical aspect of Water for People’s approach in remote villages like Kayarani is its Android feature that uses GPS and GoogleEarth software. The feature program is called FLOW (Field Level Operations Watch). FLOW offers an easy way to collect data, aggregate photos, conduct surveys, and communicate information via mobile phone within the area. FLOW was built by Water for People in 2010 to provide accountability and transparency to donors and the public.

FLOW is different from other programs in that it’s much easier to maintain accountability through its instant feedback electronic database. This accountability allows Water for People and the local community to find creative, collaborative solutions using data that challenge anecdotal norms. FLOW is adaptable, allowing users to create surveys on any topic in order to best reflect the impact of the project. The fact that it’s a phone feature means that data can be collected anywhere and later automatically uploaded if there isn’t a mobile connection.

In 2011, Kayarani built a gravity-fed water system with assistance from Water for People and the local government. This system provides reliable and safe water for the fifty families in the community. The infrastructure was co-financed by the local community to encourage maintenance. The local government also provides hygiene education through a worker who regularly visits every household to collect data throughout the different phases of the water and sanitation project. A FLOW worker will continue to monitor and evaluate the project for ten years, ensuring that everyone in the village has adequate access to water and sanitation forever.

SciDev.Net reports the success of  a mobile phone application that can be used by low-cost feature phones to monitor local water quality via SMS. The Water Quality Reporter (WQR) can be used to check microbiological contamination, and carry out residual chlorine and hydrogen sulphide tests. 

The application was developed using open source programming and iCOMMS software, iCOMMS is part of the University of Cape Town. This team has also developed mechanisms for integrating water quality results into existing information systems.

iCOMMS wishes to expand the application, which is available for download at their site,  into the greater network of water treatment processes.

WaterWiki.net, a UNDP, UN-Water initiative recently relaunched and added more features such as a LinkedIn discussion forum. WaterWiki is a useful resource and popular forum for practitioners and agencies. It features over 800 articles, case studies and reports.

Some of the best features:

mw4d launches new site

mw4d, a research initiative that uses mobile technology for water management in Africa launched a new website in January. mw4d is based within the Oxford Water Futures Program at the University of Oxford. The site highlights projects and resources for innovative mobile applications that “help achieve water security and reduce poverty” in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia.

Currently mw4d has three main projects:

Smart Handpumps

Smart Rivers

Mobile Water Payments

These projects allow for the monitoring of water use patterns, proper allocation of resources, and sustainability of water supply services. Please check out their resources for exciting projects worldwide.

Close up of a drop of water splashingThere’s been considerable debate lately about possible uses of information and communications technology for watershed management. Access to monitoring programs assists governments adequately manage and distribute water. Watershed management is critical for regional ecological health, clean water ability, disaster relief, and agriculture.

5 Noteworthy ICT Watershed Management Projects

  •  eGov features India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) that uses GIS mapping and GPS enabled mobile applications for planning and monitoring rainwater harvested agricultural land. The watershed is analyzed  through interactive online mapping available in local languages, engaging parties at the village, regional, and state levels. Through this process scarce water is conserved by a supervised drainage line, promoting the cultivation of arable land and responsible seasonal planning. An overview of this project is available HERE.
  • A similar project, MeKongInfo, is available to citizens along the Mekong River Basin  in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. The site houses a database and online discussion that is sponsored by the Mekong River Commission (MRC). It contains  many aspects including flood mitigation, fishery management and other issues of overall planning.
  • AgWater Solutions is collaborating with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and others in Ethiopia through workshops to address small reservoirs and groundwater systems investment.
  • Rio+20’s ICT as an Enabler for Smart Water Management report  includes case-studies on ICTs for smart water initiatives. Also worthy of noting as a resource is the United Nations’ Virtual Learning Centre distance-learning course on Integrated Water and Environmental Management for creating regional resource databanks to enhance sustainable water management practices. The course is available through Regional Centres of Excellence in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific.

The World Bank and several technology partners held the first global WaterHackathon, inviting computer programmers, designers and other ICT specialists to develop solutions to water and sanitation (WASH) development challenges.

Water Hackers at Kampala hackathon

Photo credit: World Bank

The hackathon took place simultaneously in ten locations, including Washington DC, Nairobi, Bangalore, and Lima. The World Bank reports that “nearly 1000 people registered worldwide to participate in the event…to try to solve – ‘hack’ – more than 100 water problems.” A team of water experts sat down with ICT experts to identify these problems beforehand, which were related to on-going World Bank water projects.

One of the pre-defined problems was with the water utility customer service center in Botswana. The center is often so overwhelmed by calls regarding bill status that many customers abandon payment efforts or are forced to travel to the service center just to receive simple answers about their bills.

The winning hack team, comprised of students from George Mason University at the Washington DC Hackathon, developed a prototype that simulated customers in Botswana sending and instantly receiving SMS messages with simple answers to bill-related questions. The solution could save customers time as well as improve revenue and operating efficiency for the water utility.

Other winners included a tool created by a team in Kampala that crowd sources and visualizes water-related problems in communities, as well as a smartphone tool to help consumers understand their water usage over time. In Bangalore, a winning team developed an app that links an SMS stream to an ongoing project, allowing implementers to track, gather, and analyze data about their projects. OpenStreetMap made hydrological data from the Ministry of Agriculture public for the first time at the Lima Hackathon.

Water Hackers at Lima Hackathon

Water Hackathon in Lima; courtesy of World Bank

Each Hackathon location provided outlets for showcasing and refining the winning solutions, some winners receiving spots in local technology centers to further develop their products. Event organizers will continue to track the outcomes of the events, and many teams have connected with teams in other locations in order to foster future collaboration.

Information and communications technology has a growing role in international development.  Global connectivity through the Internet and through mobile phone technology is bringing people closer together to trade, share, and learn in a wide range of sectors, from agriculture, to manufacturing, financial services to water supply.

4In coming weeks and months, we will feature innovations in ICT for environmental protection and the sustainable use of natural resources in these pages.  Today we will begin with an overview of some of the different ways in which ICT can be used, and give a few examples of innovative products that we think can make a difference.  Someday, we would like to have an exhaustive survey of tools. Those of you who are reading this are almost certainly already familiar with the topic.  If that’s the case, you’ll know the power of social networking.  Let’s do a little social networking of our own and share ideas about ICT for natural resources – either innovations that you feel the world should know more about, or ideas that you have for innovations that should be brought to the attention of technology community.

ICT can make a difference in natural resource management in several ways.  A major contribution the improvement of information used for decision making and access to that information. The science of data management is called informatics, and sometimes when the term is used for environmental sciences, it is called ecoinformatics. A key to good data management is interoperability. To better understand trends and causal relationships, it is necessary to combine data from different sources. Doing this requires the development of standards and protocols for describing phenomena, as well as quality control to ensure that the knowledge that results is based on facts.  We will review ecoinformatics in more detail in later posts; for now, have a look at Data Basin, a fantastic tool for curating data that can be located in space and time using maps.  Data Basin provides a way to host and manipulate data sets to create knowledge – to tell a story based upon observations.  But it goes further – it includes a reputation system for ranking data sets, and social networking tools to bring data users together to interpret, critique, and collaborate in the development of knowledge products.

Of course, information is not very useful if it is not accessible.  And access to reliable information has long been a barrier to effective decision-making in many parts of the world.  This is changing.  Not only is direct access to the Internet expanding, but mobile smartphones can be used in many parts of the world to send and receive data.  An exciting development is the use of mobile applications, or “apps”, to address specific needs.  For example, the World Bank DataFinder app can be used to quickly access economic data from the World Bank’s own data servers. (Unfortunately, the first version is exclusively written for the iPhone, a device not readily available in much of the developing world.)  Mapping apps are proliferating, allowing access to topographic and thematic maps.  And farmers can use apps to learn the price of, and even sell, their commodities.  The World Bank is also sponsoring an Apps for Development competition to find new uses for World Bank data recently made publicly available.  Unfortunately, many of the submissions deal with global policy issues and there are few practical tools for natural resource management, agriculture, health, and other pressing development issues on the ground.  This will change once a demand from the field emerges, and we find better ways to link application developers with development and natural resource management practitioners. In 2009 USAID sponsored a competition, Development 2.0 through NetSquared, a technology service for social benefit organizations sponsored by Techsoup Global, a non-profit organization that helps NGOs to access donations of hardware, software, and training from the ICT industry.  Innovative partnerships such as USAID’s collaborations with NetSquared and NetHope.  NetHope is a partnership of technology providers and humanitarian organizations working to solve technology challenges.  NetHope is a Global Broadband Innovations Initiative partner.

The ability to remotely sense and monitor natural resources is an important new tool for scientists and managers.  In future weeks we will explore how ICT is being used to monitor global change, monitor biodiversity in the tropical forest canopy, monitor coral reefs, track the chain of custody of logs harvested in West African rainforests, and detect forest fires in Central America.  ICT has the potential to help identify potential links between a changing climate and disease outbreaks, forest and agricultural pests and food prices.

ICT can have significant affects where time lags are a barrier to achieving goals.  For example, early responses to emergencies such as forest fires or pest/disease/invasive species outbreaks are much more cost effective and more likely to be successful than late responses. It can also make a difference when markets are involved. For example, carbon credit monitoring can be made much for efficient, and importantly, the confidence in the effectiveness of the investment can increase when time lags concerning data about the status and extent of the resource can be eliminated. Note how the artificial boundaries created by thinking in terms of “sectors” such as agriculture, environment, and health, can blur when using data in innovative ways made possible through ICT tools.

ICT can also empower communities by enabling them to collect their own data, making it possible to overcome barriers to effective participation due to nonexistent or inaccessible information, and lessen their dependence upon often inaccessible outside experts.  Using ICT communities can monitor resource use, integrate traditional ecological knowledge with scientific data, and participate as full partners in decision-making processes.  A participatory Geographic Information Systems (computer mapping) community already exists, and an international grassroots mapping network is sharing progress using low-cost tools such as digital cameras and kites or helium balloons to create highly detailed area maps.

  • We will also review some yet unmet needs that ICT can fulfill, such as:
  • Real-time access to information to help port inspectors to identify pests while performing their duties (e.g., warehouses, docks)
  • Access to keys to help parataxonomists working to identify specimens of rare or harmful species
  • Remote upload of information from field observations and query of decision support tools that can be used in a dynamic situation like a disaster response.
  • Information on spot markets for natural resource products and for reservations and logistics for remote tourism facilities such as ecotourism operations, often associated with parks and protected areas.

Some additional considerations involve the possibility of social barriers to the use of ICT.  For example, women and men may have different access to ICT, as well as different needs and different ways of approaching its use.  Frequently, access to tools and equipment by women remains problematic even when ICT is available to the community. We will look for examples of how use patterns, specific needs, and cultural contexts are being used to maximize women’s participation in technology transfer.  More technology-savvy youth may dominate ICT, limiting its use by elders and thereby failing to access important historical knowledge and perspectives.  As with gender, care should be taken in introducing technologies to ensure that its use doesn’t promote inequality or skew the generation of knowledge.

Here are some tools for natural resource management that we will look at in more depth.

1) GPS. Global Positioning System. Used for recording location, useful for georeferencing data entry and producing maps.  Often integrated into cameras and smartphones. Geotagging photographs links a visual record to an observation.

2) GIS. Geographic Information System.  Manipulates georeferenced data in “map layers” to permit overlaying and comparing different types of information. GIS can integrate georeferenced field observations (e.g., from GPS) with remotely sensed images from satellites and aircraft, and digitized maps of terrain, landcover, infrastructure, demography, etc.  Extremely complex to use and expensive in commercial versions; open source GIS is growing rapidly to overcome barriers to entry by communities, small businesses and local government.  The discipline of participatory GIS (PGIS) focuses on making tools and techniques available to communities for natural resource planning. The PGIS community provides peer to peer technical assistance through a web site and email list.

3.  Telecommunications.  Voice, text (SMS) messaging, and other data transmitted over handheld devices used in natural resource management for managing, monitoring and reporting.

4.  Remote sensing.  Some satellite remote sensing data has been made freely available and is accessible providing the technology is in place to receive and process it.  Other data, primarily from high resolution commercial instruments, can be extremely expensive.  Efforts to overcome these barriers include:

  • Terralook, a service developed by NASA and provided by USGS includes georectified LANDSAT and ASTER images as high resolution JPEG compressed images.  Terralook provides a free opensource viewer that allows users to do basic measurements, annotations, and classifications of the images.
  • Several projects have supported the development of a hybrid GPS and camera system that can be mounted on fixed and rotary winged aircraft for mapping along transects, with software to connect tiles to provide a large-scale georeferenced image that can be used with GIS systems (high resolution cameras have been able to capture images as small as 5 cm at 1500′ elevation).
  • Automated remote monitoring.  An early example of the use of ICT for natural resource management was the US Forest Service’s Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS) deployed throughout western forests in the US to monitor fire weather.  Advances in technology now make it possible to create environmental sensor networks using high-tech miniature robots to record minute changes in the environment and transmitting the data to computers through telecommunications networks or satellite uplinks.  In the USA, a consortium of research institutions has created a National Ecological Observatory Network to monitor environmental impacts and changes. With the costs declining, these tools will soon be within reach of developing countries, to monitor critical watersheds, environmental impacts of extractive industries, and the habitats of rare and endangered species.

Technology transfer is an important tool for achieving global goals for economic development, biodiversity conservation, and the protection of ecosystem services.  It can help to advance effective governance and rule of law through a more informed, mobilized public and better monitoring of resource use to ensure that it is lawful as well as sustainable.  As a package, better governance and better information will provide an improved chance to lift the rural poor of the world out of poverty.

I work with a small NGO in the Cook Islands called Te Rito Enua. We recently concluded a pilot project funded by the Asian Development Bank to test the use of participatory GIS techniques to help develop community-scale climate adaptation strategies.  Some of our key findings echo those Oregon State University scientists Sally Duncan and Denise Lach.  As reported in the People and Place blog, they observe that

“Exchange of ideas and knowledge with the assistance of a technology that is both analytical and visual draws participants into new kinds of inquiry, calling upon broader kinds and definitions of knowledge and experience. In such a setting, GIS technology lends itself to the mapping of ideas as well as landscapes.(emphasis is mine)

In our own work, we found that that the approach provides communities with the tools to assess climate risk  according to their own frames of reference. Linking models with personal experience and traditional ecological knowledge gave the communities tangible evidence of climate risk that empowers them to own the problem and develop personal and collective responses based on their own needs and priorities.  The participatory GIS process highlights behavioral and development issues that affect the vulnerability of individual households and the community at large. There was a discernable sense of empowerment by participating communities in developing vulnerability maps and planning on the basis of the spatially organized information.

Replicating the process is problematic though.  We opted to use expensive high-end commercial GIS software to match the system used by the government. All the GIS expertise in the country (basically 2 people at the start of the project) were schooled in the use government system. We needed to work with those people.  But the high end systems are a formidable barrier to entry; acquiring the software, hardware, and training costs thousands of dollars.   Communities and NGOs lack those resources, and the emerging, computer-savvy generation lacks learning opportunities.  In our final report, we recommended the use of open source software and support for regional training to build up the GIS community.

Fortunately the support for open-source GIS is growing fast.  Some resources for beginners include:

The Participatory GIS Forum (www.ppgis.net) (and be sure to see the very helpful email list for PPGIS, links on the site).

Mapping Across Borders/Digital Distractions blog ( http://mikedotonline.wordpress.com/ )

Quantum GIS open source software (www.qgis.org)

And  a new site, Training Kit on Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communications (http://pgis-tk-en.cta.int/)

Don’t forget that good data layers can often be found at Data Basin, and you can upload and share your files there.  (www.databasin.org)

I’ve experienced significant resistance to participatory mapping in the past from the GIS technical community.  It is true that you can produce complete garbage in GIS.  And garbage, in planning, can be dangerous.  But the answer doesn’t lie in treating geospatial planning as an esoteric art and shunning the novices.  The answer lies in widening the pool of experts and providing support for grassroots initiatives.  Duncan and Lech observe:

“The frequent repetition of the phrase “re-framing the debate” during focus-group discussions highlighted the progression from the one-way communication model, in which scientists impart their findings, to the dynamic process of engaging GIS technology as a tool of inquiry, mediation, and communication. Ideas suggested for a broader debate included making assumptions explicit on GIS maps, using the power of GIS to examine new questions, and sharing responsibility for new kinds of learning. …”

Duncan, S. and Lech, D.  2006.  GIS Technology in Natural Resource Management:  Process as a Tool of Change.  Cartographica 41:3, 201-205.  DOI: 10.3138/3571-88W4-77H2-3617.

Sounds like development to me.

[The Te Rito Enua project report can be downloaded at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1735507/ADB%20SGI%20report/Final%20Report-web.pdf]

Vine map superimposed on Google Earth; sources Benjamin White and Google Earth, all rights reserved

Over the past year, I’ve been working with a Cook Islands NGO, Te Rito Enua, with funding from the Asian Development Bank, to develop a pilot project on participatory GIS  as a tool to assist island communities to develop climate adaptation strategies. While there, Mona Matepi, president of TRE, called my attention to the problem of invasive vines on the island. Three species of woody vines* are colonizing the island forests, causing massive deforestation. They overtop and kill trees, replacing the forest with a solid jungle of vines.  Since Rarotonga is dependent upon surface water for its entire supply, and since vines were killing the trees in its forested watershed, it seems like a non-trivial issue.  Nobody knows how the vines will affect water supply.  Will they reduce surface water supply through evapotranspiration?  Will they hold the soils as well as the trees they are replacing?  How will they respond to the more frequent cyclones and droughts that climate models predict?  And, if they are a problem, how can they be controlled?  Many questions to answer – our challenge right now is to find support for research into the issues and the options available.  If no one does anything, there’s a chance, and its not a tiny one, that there could someday be a humanitarian crisis that would have severe implications for one of the dwindling number of robust Polynesian cultures remaining.

I asked University of Maryland doctoral candidate Benjamin White, a remote sensing specialist, for advice on how to illustrate the extent of the vine infestation.  The island is rugged and steep, difficult to map on foot.  But I was able to take some measurements using a handheld GPS unit.  Ben offered to have a go at classifying the vines using my field observations as training data.  Commercial remote sensing imagery provider GeoEye donated high-resolution (4m and 1m) satellite images. Ben developed a sophisticated neural net classifier, and processed the images as R/G/IR reflectance, reflectance-based NDVI, principal components, mean texture and a quick reflectance to “dense vegetation” classification.   The final result was uploaded to Google Earth for visualization purposes; Google Earth data is not useful for this kind of application, but overlaying the classification results on a Google Earth image gives a context in terms of location and topography.  Additional satellite imagery could provide complete ground coverage and (subject to availability) time series to measure change in land cover.

I’m hoping that the image will drive home how bad the problem is, and mobilize some support for Te Rito Enua and the Cook Islands government to get a handle on the vine problem.

Heartfelt thanks go to Ben White and the University of Maryland Geography Department, GeoEye, and the Asian Development Bank for support.

* the vines are Cardiospermum grandiflorum, Mikania micrantha, and Merremia peltata.

via GREEN HAND.

Copyright © 2020 Integra Government Services International LLC