UC Davis Blum Center for Developing Economies

As part of my current research as a Ph.D. student in UC Davis, I spend a few weeks in Haiti studying the role remittances play in the financial security of Haitian households. The objective of my visit was the establish the potential impact of a remittances services that delivers the money directly to the user’s mobile phone savings accounts. I was surprise by how advance mobile money is in Haiti. It offers a wide range of services that are beyond what is offered in any other Latin American country. Mobile money, in Haiti known as MonCash, can be access in small shops. Shops that are part of MonCash network act as an intermediary between the customer and the mobile company.  They sell merchandise and provide MonCash services to attract visitors to the shop. The convenience of mobile money does not stop with the availability of a large network of agents that can be used to deposit and withdraw funds, in country where bank branches are difficult to find. The real advantage is th...

Once we had placed the order for the filter casing and were working on the pump, we decided to track down the filter media that would go into the casing: sand, pea gravel and coarse gravel. Our colleague took us shops which catered to construction purposes and we picked up 4 bags of sand and 2 bags of gravel first. This was less sand that we needed, but we wanted to check the integrity of the 1.2 mm thick filter casing before taking it to Phat Sanday, the floating village we were assigned to. The casing was delivered the same day as the sand (Tuesday), and we assembled it the next day. On Thursday, it was still holding the pressure and weight of the sand and gravel and we decided it was time to take it to the village. We set out at 5 am on Friday – 6 people, 6 bags of sand, 2 bags of gravel, a PVC pump, several PVC pipes and a 1 m tall stainless-steel filter casing, all in one SUV. 3 hours later, we were in the village of Chhnok Trou. It is from here that we took a boat to go to P...

During winter and spring quarter 2017, my teammates and I (Team WASHOut) designed a sanitation station using a Biosand Filter. This was our effort towards providing clean water to students in floating schools on the Tonle Sap lake. We were provided with the opportunity to go to Cambodia and implement our project in person through the Blum grant, and we worked with Wetlands Work!, our clients for the senior design class. Figure 1 Rendering of Sanitation Station   We spent our time at UC Davis designing the station – sketches, CAD models, renderings, dimensions, engineering analysis and testing. We made a prototype in Davis, which we showed during the Senior Design Showcase in June, to test flow rates and water quality standards. The next step was to take the design to Phnom Penh and manufacture it there. We got to work as soon as we got there. My teammate and I were introduced to people on the WW! team who could help with translation, and we began scouting the city to fin...

Two weeks into our stay, my teammate and I were invited to attend Cambodia’s 9 th Sanitation in Challenging Environments (SCE) Forum under the theme of "Technologies Testing, Designs, and Manual" organized by Engineers Without Border Australia. The SCE Forums are an opportunity to come together and share information on topics regarding sanitation, hear case studies, share research, and work together to develop innovative solutions and partnerships to improve sanitation access for communities living in challenging environments in Cambodia. Presentations were made by several stakeholders who were working towards developing sanitation solutions in Cambodia. Wetlands Work!, our senior design client, also presented their technical solution and provided updates on its progress. Wetlands Work! is a social enterprise that designs and builds innovative systems to tackle the problem of wastewater management in Cambodia. WW!’s product is the HandyPod, an aquatic wastewater treat...