Tag Archive for 'innovation'

This is the second of two posts about water stories in the media.  Read post #1 here.

PBS rethinks it’s positive coverage of PlayPumps
While PBS was strong in its coverage on the Jim Lehrer News Hour, the same cannot be said for their work on Frontline. The recent Frontline story is a follow up of a 2005 story about the Playpump, a merry-go-round that provides play for kids and water for the community.

The Playpump took off with Frontline’s uncritically positive portrayal of the approach. Over time, as with most naïve and poorly conceived efforts at addressing a complex social problem, the outcomes fell far short of the promise and Frontline ended up doing an expose of the group it had propelled to prominence. The piece was full of hand-wringing and angst and sent the message that maybe resolving the global water crisis is a hopeless pursuit.

The solution is in the process, not the product
But the solution is actually pretty simple and Water 1st supporters have been funding it for years. Work with a local partner organization that specializes in this work and has a good track record. The local partner organizes the community to construct and maintain the project. Safe water is provided at conveniently located taps that eliminate the walk for water. The system is designed to meet the demand for everybody in the community for years to come. The system is designed to keep water safe from the source to the point of use. Everyone should have access to a toilet. Everyone should learn critical hygiene behaviors. Then follow up with rigorous monitoring and evaluation to be sure the beneficiaries get what they were promised and have the skills to keep it going.

Stop looking for the silver bullet
Where Frontline and others fail is in their inability to untangle the presuppositions that are driving the not-for-profit world today. Everything is built upon a deep-seeded faith in innovation. To support my case, I will share with you some examples and I will primarily use text directly from the websites of the organizations in question:

1. There is the Skoll Award. The Skoll Foundation’s mission is to advance systemic change to benefit communities around the world by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurs are those who apply innovative solutions to social and environmental issues, empowering people and communities to envision and create positive change.
2. Starting in 2010, the Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value will be awarded every other year to encourage and reward an outstanding innovation or project in the areas of water, nutrition or rural development.
3. The State Department followed suit and has their own innovation award. “The Secretary’s Innovation Award for the Empowerment of Women and Girls seeks to find and bring to scale the most pioneering approaches to the political, economic and social empowerment of women and girls around the globe.”
4. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to bringing innovations in health and learning to the global community. Every eye is on the innovator, inventor, entrepreneur who has the right gadget. The tendency seems to be that we see a problem and looks for a solution in one place – the new inventions press release pile.

The Playpump fits nicely into that mold. The press packaged the story and funders gobbled it up. The outcomes were pretty abysmal. In far too many instances, what was promoted as water for communities and fun for kids wound up delivering neither.

Unfortunately, the Playpump story is not an isolated incident. The recent Economist article seems to head for the same precipice in its promotion of a product called the Peepoo bag. The Economist article states that slum areas can’t support private toilets. According to the article, population density is too high to find the space to build toilets and slum dwellers aren’t going to make improvements on property they don’t own. So the Economist goes on to tout the Peepoo bag, invention of a Swedish entrepreneur. I don’t even want to mention what his invention is because it is so stupid and dehumanizing. You can look it up in the article. Water 1st will go on record right now saying it won’t work.

The fact is that Water 1st supports an organization in Dhaka, Bangladesh (the world’s most densely populated city) that is building private toilets in the slums and would build more if we had more funding to send them.

Regardless of Water 1st’s opinion, there is a chance that this is the start of the cycle of media attention followed by large foundation support, leading to more media attention…Meanwhile CNN is touting the use of Hippo Rollers in Haiti to help them in their recovery from the devastating earthquake earlier this year. We think there are enough common denominators between the Hippo Roller, the Peepoo bag, and the Playpump that funders should proceed with extreme caution.

Water 1st was recently contacted by a Seattle area reporter with the question, “are you doing anything innovative?” When we explained that our long-term investments with our in-country partners over the past five years were very successful, with 100% of our projects still in operation because they are each adapted to local conditions, we were told that wasn’t innovative.

Invest in what is working now
Water 1st thinks the world should take a little time to examine this faith in innovation and entrepreneurship. Water 1st promotes the types of solutions that are currently being used by 75% of the world’s population. What is good enough for the world’s wealthiest is good enough for the world’s poorest. If we develop something that we like better, then we’ll extend that to the world’s poorest. Why? Because the world’s poor basically have the same values and preferences as the world’s rich. They just don’t have the resources to act on those preferences. So don’t be surprised if they aren’t happy with some “innovative solution” that we wouldn’t use, like a Hippo Roller or a Peepoo bag. Let’s stop looking for things that they might use and help them get the critical things that we use and value, like household taps, toilets, and education about the things they can do to maintain their families’ health.