Skip to main content

Efforts Towards Wastewater Treatment and Drive to Provide Sanitation in Cambodia by Purva Juvekar

Two weeks into our stay, my teammate and I were invited to attend Cambodia’s 9th 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 treatment system which is installed under a floating house’s toilet. It treats raw sewage by using microbial communities from plants and their roots.

In addition to presentations, the International Development Enterprises (iDE) and EWB hosted a design challenge towards the end of the conference, where they split the audience into teams of Engineers and Community. I was put into a team of 5 and we were the Engineers. We were given 10 minutes to interact with the Community team and ask them questions about sanitation and the issues they faced. The Community team was asked to create a hypothetical problem and environment. We were then given 10 minutes to come up with a solution which would fit the user needs of the Community and address their challenges. At the end, we had to pitch our solution to everyone. It was a fun challenge and helped me break the ice and interact with others despite a language barrier.

I was happy to be at the conference and see that so many people were working with passion to bring clean water and sanitation to communities in Cambodia. It showed me that people cared, and just how innovative their solutions were. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to the UC Davis Blum Center Blog!

Here you will find updates on our organization, and blog posts written by each of our Blum Fellows about their experiences abroad. Make sure to check out our website at blumcenter.ucdavis.edu, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/UCDavisBlumCenter to get regular updates and see our upcoming events.
Post a Comment
Read more

Visiting the New Roots Farm, By Stella Sappington

At this point in my project I have incorporated my supervisors notes into the first draft of the survey, asked questions regarding his changes, and begun to survey clients. Many of the changes he made were for the purposes of brevity and clarity. He removed the questions I had in place regarding favorite foods and whether the interviewee was the primary shopper, as well as an experimental question about community meals. He also managed to consolidate the multiple questions I had regarding food insecurity that were separated whether they interrogated price, unavailability or distance. I questioned these changes as I was concerned about the knowledge gap between shopper and interviewee that one report mentioned and elucidating rich responses to all aspects of food security. However, I ultimately incorporated each of his changes. At this time I have called 80 numbers intending to administer the survey with only 10 respondents. Their answers are so far similar in nature and offer good gu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sky-High Natural Dyes by Jennifer Hoover

In June of 2014, I was bracing myself for my last few days in the Himalayan village I had come to call home. I had spent 3 months there, befriending a few women with whom I worked on various textile projects. As we wrung out the last of our skeins of yarn over a dye bath, Nirmala commented, “You will always remember the time you had only two students.” “No,” I countered, “I will remember the time I had two teachers.” “Three students, three teachers,” we agreed. This, to me, is the power of participatory action research: we are all students, and all teachers; all researchers, and all research subjects. And so I am thrilled to be back for further collaboration, with the support of the Blum Center. I am here in Kullu Valley working with some participants in a women's self-help group (www.whims.in) who produce textile goods as a way of generating some independent income and preserving traditional craft skills. Although the women have started working with the acrylic ...
5 comments
Read more