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 your through this week. This week on sanitation you will learn about the method of excreta 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. 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 excreta management is presented. In addition to the theoretical part, we have ICRC 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 & 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, Lukas Ulrich and Philippe Reymond. On the EAWAG homepage you find other courses as well on household water treatment and safe storage, solid waste management and faecal sludge management. The videos use the terminology of the Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies, a publication by EAWAG. The Compendium 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 home page for new language updates. The Compendium is currently being revised and adapted for the humanitarian sector. The update will include more technologies specific for emergency settings as well as more decision criteria for the humanitarian context. It will be published in 2018. Furthermore there is a range of books and publications on sanitation in emergencies which you find on the course homepage. 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 diarrhoea. Transmission of excreta related diseases is largely through faecal oral transmission, therefore it is worthwhile to have another look at the F-Diagram. 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 faecal pathogens of entering into the environment, where they can cause disease infection. Sanitation has to be always coupled with hand hygiene promotion. A toilet facility is only complete with a handwashing station accessible in an adequate distance. This in order to have a secondary barrier from the hands to the new host. The third barrier is clean drinking water. Handwashing 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 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 a different sanitation solution was needed for the acute phase after the earthquake in April 2015 in Nepal than for the prolonged humanitarian 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 were 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, while the existing infrastructure was rehabilitated for the needs of Nepali people. The average lifespan of a refugee camp is 20 years. Therefore sanitation in the Zataari camp in Jordan is very different from the solution in Nepal. The camp was constructed in the middle of the desert for Syrian refugees. As there is no end in sight to the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, the sanitation solutions implemented 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 crisis in a given context. You will also learn about different sanitation systems and technologies. Thank you for your attention and I hope to exchange with you in the forum and I hope that you'll learn a lot this week.
