Karaoke spreads health message in Cambodia - Feature

Fri, 30 Jan 2009
DPA

Phnom Penh - In Cambodia, a country where water-borne diseases cause tens of thousands of deaths every year, one development organization is using the power of song to spread the word on safe water consumption. For the past 18 months, the US-based Resource Development International (RDI) group has combined its public health and water safety message with one of this country's most popular pastimes - karaoke.

With its purpose-built karaoke truck, the group has toured many communities in predominantely rural Cambodia and invited residents to sing along with a range of specially composed tunes.

The songs' lyrics address a range of crucial public health issues including HIV-AIDS, bird flu and water sanitation; and according to RDI country director Mickey Sampson, they have struck a chord with people of all ages.

"Workshops and community meetings are great ways to teach people about the importance of sanitation and healthy habits, but we have been amazed by the effectiveness of this karaoke programme," he said.

"These kinds of methods are very useful in countries like Cambodia where there is a poor level of literacy. I think it has also been particularly effective here because Cambodians seem to have very well developed aural abilities and they learn very well from music."

While generally limited to bars in many Western countries, karaoke is a popular family activity in Cambodia and is most commonly performed in people's homes and at parties, weddings and public festivals.

"Cambodians love karaoke, so they were more than willing to take hold of the microphone when we arrived in the villages," Sampson said. "Often making contact with people and getting them involved in campaigns can be a hurdle to raising awareness, but this is not the case with the karaoke programme."

Sampson said it was difficult to measure how the program had changed people's behaviour, but said there were signs the songs' messages were sticking.

"Although measuring the impact of the songs on behaviour is complicated, we have returned to villages weeks or months after our first visit and found that people are still singing the songs," he said.

"Combined with our other services, such as providing ceramic water features, we have found this is a very simple and effective way of raising awareness about such important health issues."

Only 16 per cent of rural Cambodians have access to toilets, according to a report released in September by the World Bank-sponsored Water and Sanitation Program.

The report also said the lack of proper water sanitation and toilets in rural areas led to the deaths of more than 12,000 children aged under five through diarrhea-related illnesses each year.

According to figures published on RDI's website, water-borne diseases contribute to 74 per cent of deaths in Cambodia each year.

Karaoke videos deliver clean water tips

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
WaterTechOnline.com

Kien Svay, Cambodia — One nonprofit organization is using karaoke videos to teach Cambodian villagers about the benefits of drinking safe water and to test wells for arsenic levels, according to a January 27 NPR “Morning Edition” report.

Wells and rivers in Cambodia carry risks from such contaminants as bacteria, parasites, pesticides and arsenic.

NPR’s Jon Hamilton, a correspondent on the science desk, interviewed Mickey Sampson, Ph.D., country director of nonprofit organization Resource Development International (RDI). One of the organization’s projects makes ceramic water filters that remove most bacteria and parasites from water; another teaches Cambodians about the benefits of drinking safe water and how to protect themselves from unsafe water.

Sampson told NPR that RDI was facing two challenges: Many Cambodians cannot read and many poor villagers accept waterborne diseases as part of life. After hearing his children’s babysitter singing — in English — a familiar song from the children’s television program “Barney,” he said he found that “education through media, through song was the way that we needed to go. That was the piece of the puzzle that was missing, not technology.”

According to NPR, in Cambodia, new songs usually arrive in the form of karaoke videos.

Sampson and the RDI team created a series of karaoke videos that are accompanied by familiar tunes with educational lyrics. According to the RDI Web site, “While Americans might find an educational song to be ‘cheesy’ or less than desirable, RDI has found that audiences are eager to sing our educational songs because of the very high quality in which they are written, played, and vocalized.”

To access the NPR report, click here.

Clay Pot Filters Extolled for Clean Water

By Taing Sarada, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
23 October 2008

Click here to listen to the Khmer audio program

The use of clay pot filters can effectively clean water and reduce the need of heating materials such as gas, wood or charcoal, according to Resource Development International Cambodia.

The organization is trying to disseminate 35,000 of the filters, which can clean water just as effectively as boiling it, said Mickey Sampson, RDIC’s country director, in an interview in Washington. The group hopes to fill clean water needs of 200,000 people, including students at schools, he said.

Water filtration can help Cambodians with a widespread problem that leads to stomach pain, diarrhea and potential death in children, Sampson said.

“My organization is working in many provinces, but I think most of the work is in the schools,” he said. The organization was showing teachers how to use the water filters for use in classrooms and for teachers to sell them in the future, he said.

“It is also to help their neighbors to be able to use the clean water filter at their house,” he said.

Each pot costs 33,000 riel, around $8, and can be paid for in installments, Sampson said. His group is trying to sell the filter pots in 15 provinces and has been particularly successful in Siem Reap and Kandal provinces.

Filtration may even be preferable to well water, which can be poisoned with toxins, including arsenic, Sampson said. He encouraged villagers to check with the Ministry of Rural Development on the safety of their wells or have them tested.

The provinces of Kandal, Prey Veng and Kampong Cham, as well as other provinces along major rivers, have all been found to have a potential arsenic threat, Sampson said.

Minister of Water Resources Lim Kien Hor, applauded the RDIC water filtration pots and agreed that arsenic was of concern in some locations.

“Most of our citizens are using well water,” he said. “As you know, most of the well water along our rivers is contaminated with arsenic. It is seriously toxic.”

The government hopes to pass a water law and to circulate warnings to areas in danger, he said.

One Cambodian woman in Phnom Penh, Chi Yu Mai, said her family has been using the clay pot filter for two years, and her family has never been sick from its water. She has even saved money by using it, she said.

“The use of this clay water filter is providing us a lot benefit,” she said. “One, it does not waste time to boil water. Two, it provides good health for us.”

Meanwhile, RDIC has also set up videos to teach young children to read Khmer, the importance of hand-washing for health and sanitation, and the dangers of HIV and AIDS. More information can be found at www.rdic.org.

Ceramic Filters for Drinking Water Improving Health in Cambodia

U.S. private, public sectors promote local manufacture of basic technology

21 October 2008
By Nancy L. Pontius
Special Correspondent
America.gov (US Gov't)

Littleton, Colorado — In more than 100,000 Cambodian households, the use of ceramic drinking-water filters produced in Cambodia is estimated to have reduced instances of diarrhea by 46 percent compared to similar households that have not used the filters.

Ceramic filters are effective, affordable and easy to use, making them “among the very best health interventions available today,” Joe Brown, a University of Alabama assistant professor, told America.gov.

Brown and Mark Sobsey, a University of North Carolina (UNC) professor, led a study of ceramic-filter use in Cambodia that showed the filters removed microbial contaminants effectively for at least three years to four years in homes.

The study, carried out by the UNC School of Public Health and funded by UNICEF and the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program, received the International Water Association 2008 Project Innovation Award Grand Prize for Small Projects.

"Locally produced ceramic water filters are a new technology in Cambodia,” Brown said. “This project showed that people continue to use the filters effectively generally for three to four years, usually until the filters break.”

Costing less than $10 each, these easy-to-use filters can be constructed and installed using locally available materials. The ceramic filters, which look like large flowerpots, are especially valuable in rural locations that lack safe drinking water and electricity.

“Ceramic filters are a really attractive option to help people live healthy lives,” Brown said.

MANUFACTURING, MARKETING, DISTRIBUTING CERAMIC FILTERS

Two U.S. nonprofit organizations have helped with filter manufacturing, marketing and training in schools and households in Cambodia:

• Resource Development International (RDI), which receives U.S. funding from the Give2Asia Foundation, the Coca-Cola Company and partnerships with UNC, Stanford University, Dartmouth College and the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.

• International Development Enterprises (IDE), whose funding sources include the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Two other U.S. nonprofit organizations, the American Red Cross and Potters for Peace, were involved in early assistance efforts.

In 2002, the RDI ceramic-filter factory was built with a $10,000 grant from a private U.S. donor. That factory has been self-supporting from filter sales for the last three and a half years.

“Studies [including the Brown and Sobsey filter study] have shown that people who pay for filters use them longer, more effectively and are more likely to replace them than people who are given free filters,” Michael Sampson, RDI founder, told America.gov.

“Most of our filter distribution is through very low-cost sales to private individuals,” Sampson said. RDI introduces the filters in schools using catchy music videos and puppet shows teaching hygiene education. School teachers act as distributors, selling the filters in their communities and earning extra income.

“Sometimes filters are purchased using very small loans, such as paying $1 a month for eight months,” Sampson said. “Filter ownership empowers the Cambodians to solve their own problems — helping themselves and building their self-esteem.”

More than 100,000 Cambodian households now use the filters, including Noy and Than, a Cambodian couple who live in Preak Thom with their six children, Sampson said. The family lives near a lake that provides its drinking water.

Before using a ceramic filter, family members regularly were sick with diarrhea. In 2004, they began using a ceramic filter for their drinking water and their health greatly improved, Sampson said. “Because he is now healthier, Noy is able to work more, and the couple spends less money on medicine for their children because they get sick less often.”

Than was hired in 2007 to work in the filter factory on final filter-production steps. “She has realized the additional benefit of earning a good income,” Sampson said, “And her salary comes from regional filter sales that now pay for all aspects of running the factory.”

DEPLOYING CERAMIC-FILTER MANUFACTURING INTO OTHER COUNTRIES

Several U.S. organizations, including RDI and IDE, are helping other countries with this drinking-water technology.

In addition, a new USAID public-private partnership — Market-based Approaches to Scaling and Sustaining Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (MASSWaSH) — will focus on “achieving distribution of ceramic water purification filters and other household water, sanitation and hygiene technologies at a national scale in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos,” John Pasch, USAID regional water policy adviser, told America.gov.

MASSWaSH also will work to increase consumer demand for effective water and hygiene technologies, such as rainwater storage systems and latrines.

USAID is providing $8.5 million for this project, funding that is being matched dollar for dollar by private U.S. organizations. UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health will oversee the project’s research and a consortium of U.S. nonprofits will implement activities in Southeast Asia.

“A ceramic-filter factory does not require complicated technology, and can be set up virtually anywhere, using local materials, local labor and local technical expertise,” Tom Outlaw of MASSWaSH told America.gov.

RDI has helped set up filter factories in Burma, Sri Lanka, Laos and Indonesia, and is planning to help establish factories in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sampson said. “The key to sustainable filter distribution is having filters produced locally and distributed through existing local market channels.”

RDI worked with the nonprofit Engineers Without Borders to develop a detailed handbook — freely available to other nations — to help transfer filter technology and the lessons learned.

Information about manufacturing, marketing and distributing ceramic filters is available on the RDI Web site.

Drinking water solution project in Cambodia wins IWA award

JAKARTA, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- A study that offers ceramic water filters as a sustainable solution for rural drinking water treatment in Cambodia, has won the International Water Association (IWA) 2008 Project Innovation Award Grand Prize for Small Projects in Vienna recently, a release by the World Bank Indonesia said.

According to the release received by Xinhua on Monday, the study is funded by UNICEF and the Water and Sanitation Program and implemented by the University Of North Carolina School of Public Health.

The goals of the study were to characterize the microbiological effectiveness and health impacts of the ceramic water purifier, a household-scale ceramic filtration technology, in target populations and to identify successes and potential challenges facing the scale-up and implementation of the technology.

Results from the study suggested that the filters could significantly improve household water quality, offering up to 99.99 percent less E. coli in treated versus untreated water, said WSP Cambodia Senior Water and Sanitation Specialist Jan-Willem Rosenboom.

Ceramic filters have helped many families in rural Cambodia, especially those living in villages where the ground water has proven to be contaminated with arsenic. Using these affordable filters, families can use surface water for drinking and cooking while continuing to use their contaminated wells for other purposes such as washing and gardening, Dr Mao Saray, Director of Rural Water Supply, Ministry of Rural Development, Cambodia said.

Chapel Hill (USA) water filters save Cambodians

A Chapel Hill project is helping supply safe drinking water to Cambodian homes by selling affordable water filters. (Photo: Joe Brown)

Jan 3, 2008
By Prashant Nair
chh@heraldsun.com
The Herald-Sun (Durham, North Carolina, USA)

CHAPEL HILL -- Ka Har, 55, a mushroom grower from the Angkor Ban village in Cambodia, lives on the banks of one of the world's longest rivers -- the Mekong of Southeast Asia. One of Har's biggest concerns was getting safe drinking water for his family. Harvested rain water and boiled water from the river kept Har and his family disease-free.

That was until June 2006 when Har heard a radio advertisement for a newly-developed water filter and saw a market demonstration in his native village. Ever since Har bought a filter for his home, he has stopped worrying about how to get safe drinking water.

Har is only one example of the 11 million rural Cambodians whose lives may be changed for the better by an initiative conceived several thousand miles away in Chapel Hill.

The Carolina Global Water Partnership is a collaborative project to prevent children in Southeast Asia from dying of water-borne diseases by bringing safe water to their homes.

Diarrhea accounts for more than 80 percent of the deaths among Cambodian children below 5 years of age. Mark Sobsey, an environmental scientist at the School of Public Health at UNC, wants to prevent Cambodian children from dying of diarrhea. Sobsey heads the project aimed at promoting inexpensive, household water purifiers in rural Cambodia.

Cambodian governmental records are imperfect and downplay the magnitude of the water problem, Sobsey said. About 35 percent of rural Cambodians have access to improved water -- microbiologically unsafe water that has been partially treated to remove particulates -- for their basic needs, he added. "The rest do not even have access to that."

The situation in urban Cambodia is slightly better, but a lot of the pipe water is contaminated, Sobsey said. "It's a national problem in Cambodia. Thailand and Vietnam are a little better."

Sobsey successfully tested two kinds of water purification systems -- ceramic filters and biosand filters -- to decontaminate water at a low cost in Cambodia.

Ceramic water purifiers are clay pot filters which resemble flower pots and contain a mixture of clay and a combustible organic material like sawdust. When these clay pots are fired in the kiln during manufacture, the sawdust disappears, leaving behind tiny holes smaller than the size of a typical bacterium. Bacteria and parasites are trapped in the holes when contaminated water is filtered.

Three Cambodian nongovernmental organizations called Research Development International, International Development Enterprises and the Cambodian Red Cross have joined hands to manufacture and sell the filters at $8 a piece. The filter has an average life of three years and filters about half a gallon of water an hour.

Sobsey has scientific evidence that the filters work. He conducted randomized clinical trials to validate the efficiency of the filters by comparing the incidence of diarrhea in 70 households in Cambodia for six months in homes that used the standard version of the filter, the improved one or no filter at all.

"We saw a 45 percent reduction in diarrheal disease in families that used the filters versus those that did not," Sobsey said.

The downside of using the filter is that the pot may break, or the faucet to which it is attached may have to be replaced. "This happens roughly about every two years, and each replacement part costs about three to four dollars," Sobsey said.

Biosand filters are the other innovation that Sobsey successfully promoted in Cambodia. In a biosand filter, a cylindrical or rectangular bed of sand particles lies atop a layer of gravel that prevents the sand from washing away. An outlet at the bottom of the filter cycles water through the sand layer before it is discharged.

Covered with water at all times, the sand contains harmless microbes that kill pathogens in the water by competing for nutrients with the pathogens or directly ingesting them.

In a study published in the March 2006 issue of the journal Water Science and Technology, Sobsey's team showed that biosand filters removed 93 percent of the harmful bacteria from water in a field analysis of 55 household filters in Bonao, a village in the Dominican Republic.

"The standard version of a biosand filter has a concrete housing and is cumbersome to transport. We're promoting a plastic housing for the filters," Sobsey said.

"It's the marketing models which are crucial to the success of this project," Sobsey said, explaining his collaboration with the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.

The Carolina Global Water Partnership aims to combine the assets of the UNC School of Public Health and Kenan-Flagler to create business models and commercialization strategies for the filters.

"UNC has several years of pre-existing relationships with research institutions and NGOs [nongovermental organizations] in Cambodia," said Tom Outlaw, a graduate student at Kenan-Flagler and project director of the Carolina Global Water Partnership.

Outlaw worked on regulatory issues surrounding the federal Safe Drinking Water Act for the water sanitation department of the EPA. He hopes to bring his expertise in water safety and business administration to the drawing board for outlining business models to sell the filters.

Outlaw plans to involve local entrepreneurs, convene local business partners and get commercial and nonprofit organizations to work together toward the sustainable sale of the filters.

The project will receive support from P&G and Dow Chemicals for funding, sponsoring trials and surveys and providing raw materials for the filters, said Lisa Jones Christensen, a professor of business administration at Kenan-Flagler. "It would be a folly not to think that an idea of this scale would involve many corporate partners," she added.

Jan Rosenboom, the team leader for the water sanitation program of the World Bank, works with the Cambodian Ministry of Rural Development to assess the performance and usability of Sobsey's filters in Cambodian villages.

The Water Sanitation Program and UNICEF called for proposals from academic groups to test the filters and market them in Cambodia. Sobsey and Outlaw seized this opportunity to combine forces. This spurred the UNC collaborative project.

"We evaluate the filters because consumers cannot check if the claims made by the proponents of these filters are true," Rosenboom said.

The trouble with NGOs is that they give rise to undesirable secondary trade, Rosenboom said. Although the filters are distributed free or sold at nominal rates, the sale is unregulated. Certain households buy filters in bulk and sell them to others for a margin, increasing the cost of the filters and their effective distribution. Middlemen mark up the filter prices to make small but significant profits. Such price hikes deter people from buying the filters and lead to unsafe water habits, Rosenboom added.

"Our goal is to move away from the social marketing model and to develop a commercial market for the filters where they may be sold at a fixed price and be bought at any time," Rosenboom said. The biggest challenge is to set a price at which these filters may be sold without manufacturers incurring a loss, he added. At $8 each, the filters may not be affordable to many families, Rosenboom said.

"These people don't even have money to meet their caloric needs. How will they find the means to buy water filters?" Rosenboom wondered. "We're hoping that the market and business models will take care of the financing," he added.

Research Development International, a U.S. nonprofit organization in Cambodia, has made inroads in that area. Mickey Sampson, the country director of Research Development International, is involved in marketing the filters to Cambodians.

"We do surveys from time to time and have found that people like to use the filters because they're so easy to use," Sampson said. The organization sold 26,000 filters to Cambodian families in 2006.

"We're primarily targeting schools to market the filters," Sampson said. Sampson distributes the filters to school teachers in Cambodian villages. Sampson's team visited schools, gave the filters to teachers and monitored their use in the teachers' homes. His team also conducted public information campaigns using music, puppets and drama to teach children the importance of filtering water.

Arsenic and fluoride contamination in surface water is another problem in Cambodia. Sampson's team dug shallow community wells from which chemically safe water could be taken without using buckets. Although the wells were widely used, people did not feel responsible for them, Sampson said. That experience taught Sampson's team not to give away the filters.

"When you give something away, it has no value, and the people don't have a true sense of ownership," Sampson said. So they sell the filters at $8 a piece. Since many Cambodian teachers need a second job to eke out a living, they willingly agree to work as marketers for a small fee. Using schools as portals to distribute the filters increased use, Sampson said.

If the pilot study by the Sobsey-Outlaw colloboration yields promising results, the team hopes to involve local business partners toward developing a self-sustaining filter industry in Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries.