Hello and welcome to the week on sanitation. My name is Samuel Renggli, I work as an Environmental Engineer at Eawag and I will guide you through this week. This week on sanitation, you will learn about the method of excrete management in humanitarian crises. You will know which sanitation products you have to deal with and what functional groups of sanitation technologies exist. You will learn what criteria need to be considered to select the most appropriate technology based on the needs and the context. And in the second part of the week, we do a review of sanitation technologies for the humanitarian sector. The video lectures you will see this week are a mix of new videos produced for this course where the topic of sanitation in humanitarian crises including treatment management is presented. In addition to the theoretical part, we have ICR case studies from Rwanda, Gaza and Liberia to illustrate some challenges and practices of sanitation in the humanitarian sector. There are some videos that were already featured in another MOOC by Eawag called Planning and Design of Sanitation Systems and Technologies. If you are interested to learn more in-depth about sanitation, we recommend enrolling in that course as well. These videos are presented by my colleagues, Dr. Elizabeth Tilley, Lucas Ulric and Phillipe Bremont. On the Eawag home page, you find other courses as well on household water treatment and safe storage, so that waste management and fecal sludge management. The videos use the terminology of the Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies, a publication by Eawag. The companion presents a huge range of information on sanitation systems and 57 different technologies. It is currently available in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Nepali, Vietnamese and Korean and always check our homepage for new language updates. The compendium is currently being revised and adapted for the humanitarian sector. The update will include more technologies specific for the merging setting, as well as more decision criteria for the humanitarian context. It will be published in 2018. Furthermore, there's a range of books and publications on sanitation in emergencies that you'll find on the course home page. So please go there and check it out. Ensuring public health is the first goal during any humanitarian crisis. Sanitation plays an important role in preventing diseases that can become an epidemic, such as cholera, typhoid and diarrhea. Transmission of excretion related diseases is largely through fecal oral transmission. Therefore, it is verified to have another look at the F-Diagram on this slide. To ensure public health, a multiple action approach is needed. Consisting of water supply, sanitation and hygiene promotion. Sanitation is the first barrier to avoid fecal pathogens entering into the environment or it can cost serious infection. Sanitation has to be always coupled with hand hygiene promotion. A toilet facility is only complete with a hand washing station accessible in an adequate distance. This is a secondary barrier from the hands to the new host. The third barrier is clean drinking water. Hand washing and water supply are not part of this week as we will focus on sanitation only this week. There is not one sanitation solution that fits any one context. The challenge is to find the most appropriate sanitation solution for each different context. The context is given by the type and the state of an emergency, as well as the specific geographical context. For example, the different sanitation solution was needed for the acute phase after the earthquake in April 2015 in Nepal, then for the prolonged to monitoring crisis in the Middle East that is still going on. In the city of Kathmandu shown on the image behind me, people from urban settlements were forced to leave their houses after the earthquake. People are temporarily displaced within the city or just outside. The existing sanitation infrastructure was damaged, but not destroyed completely everywhere. The sanitation response was to implement temporary, container-based toilets and pit latrines. But the existing infrastructure was rehabilitated for the needs of Nepali people. The average life span of a refugee camp at the moment is 20 years. Therefore, sanitation, for example, in the Zaatari Camp in Jordan is very different from the solution that we just saw in Nepal. The camp was constructed in the middle of the desert for Syrian refugees. If there is no end in sight to the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, the sanitation solution implemented that there are longer term and improved and upgraded incremental over time. In summary, the goal of this week is to learn what criteria to consider in order to find the most appropriate sanitation solution for each state of each type of humanitarian crises in a given context. You will also learn about different sanitation systems and technologies. I thank you very much for your attention and I hope to exchange with you in the forum, and I hope that you learn a lot this week.
