Based on exactly the same (open) system as Wikipedia, the Akvopedia’s purpose it to gather and share knowledge about low-cost, appropriate technologies that can provide water and sanitation quickly to the world’s poor. It’s about building what Jeroen van der Sommen calls “a shared hydrological memory“.

Photo: Mark Westra takes Nicole van Zurk from Akvo partner Simavi through Akvo’s online tools. International Water House, The Hague, Netherlands. 3 June 2009.

Akvo started up on the UNESCO-IHE campus in Delft – a centre for water education – and we’re now in the International Water House in The Hague, where we share space with some of the most important water knowledge institutions. The people passing through these environments have influenced our approach intensely – experts in appropriate technologies such as Henk Holtslag, one of the world’s leading experts in the field – who argues that there’s a major lack of knowledge about the options available, many of which have only been developed in the last ten years.

In the video below, Mark Tiele Westra, the Akvopedia editor who has worked closely alongside Henk himself, describes who Akvopedia is designed for, and explains a little about how it’s structured so anyone can edit the information.

Although it’s fully accessible to anyone, Akvopedia (see it here) is not designed for the general public – nor is it designed for the end user of a technology in the field. “It’s for people that work with water and sanitation options. Also the Unicefs and other large organisations, who may never have thought a particular technology was an option.”

Mark also explains how we’re connecting Akvopedia to Akvo Really Simple Reporting, which is building a database of report streams from community-level water and sanitation projects across the developing world.

Connecting knowledge to real projects

“It should also provide a context for the projects. So in Akvo RSR there will be links to details in Akvopedia of the technologies, but it will also work the other way round – so in Akvopedia, there are links to real projects that have used that technology.”

“It’s a very different thing if you see a study of a technology used somewhere, or if you see actual projects, with people trying to use this technology and talking about their experiences.”

We’re really excited about the potential to bring the technologies to life through this closer link between the static knowledge-base and real projects happening at the time. “You can get a much better feeling for a technology. It’s a very different thing if you see a study of a technology used somewhere, or if you see actual projects, with people trying to use this technology and talking about their experiences. That way you get a much better feel for if it could work for you as well.”

So who is the target user for Akvopedia?

“It’s NGOs – people that work in the water and sanitation sector. And those that want to work in this sector. Because what you see is many NGOs who started in one direction – education or health – also take up water and sanitation.”

Mark Charmer is a co-founder of Akvo.

Next week I’m taking rap star and fundraiser BangBang and his manager to Bangladesh. They’ll see for themselves – and show their fans – where his hard-earned money has gone and what kind of impact access to clean drinking water can have on a local community. We’ll also be visiting possible new partners and project sites, which the Fighting For Water campaign could support next.

Akvo’s field partner for these projects is Bangladesh Association for Social Advancement (BASA). BASA has two projects in Akvo, assisted by its support partner, WASTE. Both projects got funded through the Akvo system.

Ecological Sanitation in Schools, aims at replacing old and inadequate sanitation facilities with new toilet blocks at primary schools in Gazipur, Bangladesh. The project attracted funding from the Dutch bathroom company, Plieger. In the video above you can see the footage I shot recently on site at the school, plus an interview with the principal who explains why it’s so important the children have proper sanitation facilities. The youtube version is here. The toilet blocks are being built right now, and you can follow progress in real-time on the project page.

The second project site is in a slum in Gazipur. This is the project BangBang and his fans have made possible, and will provide clean drinking water for the local communities. The project has just started and should be in full-flow by the time we are there. In this video you can see where they plan to start drilling and how they will build the various distribution points. For the youtube version please click here.

BangBang’s kick-box fundraising event in February generated enough funds to provide 700 people with clean drinking water. I’m hoping that once he begins to share progress online with fans and other boxers and musicians, everyone will be able to raise more money and reach out to help these kids.

You can on the collage below for more photos from my recent time there.

Luuk Diphoorn is project coordinator for Akvo

We have released a couple of improvements to Akvo RSR, including updates to the donation system and the way the “Akvo at a glance” portlet displays statistics from the projects in Akvo RSR. This work continues, but I wanted to highlight some of the changes we made. All the system changes can be found in the release notes.

The way donations are displayed

Donations from individuals (via Paypal) are now shown under the funders portlet on the project page and on the funding details page. The examples are from the project: Murumba Primary School Water and Sanitation, Ugenya Kenya.

Akvo RSR ensures a project doesn’t get more money than it needs by immediately reserving, or setting aside, an amount equal to the donation. Unravelling overdonations made during high traffic periods could otherwise get quite messy!

In previous versions of Akvo RSR this reserved money would be displayed as donated, regardless of whether or not the transaction was ever actually completed (for example, if a donor went to her Paypal account but then decided not to donate and closed the window). The end result was that some projects looked like they had received funds when they actually hadn’t. This has now been fixed: projects will only list donations verified as having arrived in the Akvo Paypal account. Some projects may look like they have fewer donations than before, but the numbers shown now reflect real funds, not money that never arrived.

Updated “Akvo at a glance” portlet

The “Akvo at a glance” portlet on the home page and project listings page has had a facelift. Completed projects are shown correctly, and amounts donated by individuals has been added. The numbers which describe “People who get water/sanitation” used to follow the stringent standards of the Millenium Development Goals rules. Now these numbers follow the goals for water and sanitation set in each project’s own description.

All in all, we think this was a very good upgrade and there are several more in the pipeline. If you are interested in following the Akvo RSR development work in more detail we encourage you to check out our software project management tool which we us, Pivotal Tracker.

Toilet imagery from across the globe fronts this year’s toilet blocks at the Parade – a two month mobile theatre event that kicks-off today in Rotterdam.

At least 350,000 people will flock to The Parade, a two-month mobile theatre event – a circus turned inside out – in Rotterdam, Utrecht, the Hague and Amsterdam over the next months. And each time a visitor goes to the toilet they’ll be encouraged to pay about 50 cents towards an Akvo water project. Last year, the toilet visitors voluntarily raised over 20,000 Euro to fund this Ceramic Filter Production project in Bafoussam, Cameroon. You can check out the latest Akvo text and picture updates from the field here.

The Cameroon team has just received hands-on training in the production of ceramic water filters from experts in Cambodia. They returned to Bafoussam, Cameroon to set-up the local factory that aims to provide at least 3,000 people sustainably with safe drinking water.

This year de Parade and Earth Water, together with your help, aim to realise safe drinking water and sanitation for three schools in Tanzania, an orphanage in Sri-Lanka and this school in North-East Thailand. Akvo’s partners will make sure that project progress will be made visible online.

Local reporter Othman Soleiman from Africa Interactive visited the school in Tanzania, one of the projects de Parade aims to support with this year’s voluntary toilet contributions.

Festival de Parade opens today. I want to thank Patrick (Earth Water), Eefje and Jesse (Parade) and Rob (avexpress) for making this happen. Some pictures I shot yesterday can be found here. Do note this yellow donation bucket that Patrick came up with, that will be replaced today.

Peter van der Linde is the partner – director of Akvo

All the photo and video material published here is Creative Commons BY-SA. Please reuse and share.

Many of you have followed the long journey we’ve taken since late 2006 to do the research, build the networks, create the business plan and raise the money needed to make our ambitious open source venture work. We don’t do formal press announcements very often (here’s our other one) but we wanted to share our latest news – we’ve now cracked the €2m funding barrier, one of our early goals, following a major new agreement with Rabobank. Thanks to everyone for their support in getting us this far (yes, that includes you) and we look forward to working with you all in the years to come. Peter especially wants to thank Frederik Claasen from Micro Water Facility who helped us develop the business plan and secure these funds.

AKVO NEWS RELEASE

The Hague, Netherlands, 10 June 2009.

RABOBANK INVESTS IN AKVO.ORG

Akvo and Rabobank have agreed a long-term cooperation package to build open source software tools and payment mechanisms to support the introduction of appropriate technology water and sanitation systems in the developing world.

Rabobank Foundation and Rabobank Den Haag will underwrite a €500,000 loan to the Akvo Foundation (Stichting Akvo), to continue development of the core Akvo software platform, including Akvopedia and Akvo Really Simple Reporting (RSR). The funds will help Akvo grow as it embarks on major new partnership deals this summer that will more than double the number of projects using its system.

Rabobank’s team will help Akvo develop payment processes that improve the flow of funds between donors and project teams. Akvo will help Rabobank investigate wider applications of the core Akvo software in other areas of the Foundation’s work, such as agricultural projects.

“Akvo is focused on giving people the resources and support they need to lift themselves out of poverty and has created a unique platform and partner network that tackles a key problem – how to fund very large numbers of small development projects in an affordable way,” explains Peter Vos, senior water manager at the Rabobank.

“The Rabobank Foundation is committed to improving the lives of underprivileged and disadvantaged groups of people in society by providing them with the opportunity to live full and independent lives. We are investing in Akvo because this new generation of tools, put in the right hands, can change the pace at which people can lift themselves out of poverty.”

Akvo creates and shares internet and phone-based tools that help a global network of partners fund and follow many thousands of new water and sanitation projects. Projects typically involve grant funding of €1,000 to €30,000, a segment that has traditionally been too expensive to address. Akvo helps money flow quickly to field projects because donors choose what to fund, and follow progress, online. A set of promotional tools, called widgets, stream storylines out to a global audience, helping fundraisers build exciting new campaigns and networks.

The investment by Rabobank enables Akvo to unlock further funds from the €1 million grant award made last Autumn from the Schoklandfonds, a pioneering Dutch government fund that invests in progressive efforts to tackle Millennium Development Goals. Akvo has now secured more than €2 million to build its system and network, and this year is generating operational income for the first time.

“Akvo has found a powerful, visionary financial partner to support its growth.” said Fon Koemans, Akvo board member. “Rabobank’s values are rooted in the development of small co-operatives located in rural regions. It understands what is possible when you can put resources into the hands of communities and local project teams. It’s very compatible with Akvo.”

More information: Akvo – http://www.akvo.org / Rabobank Foundation – http://www.rabobankfoundation.com

Media enquiries: Akvo – Mark Charmer, mark [at] akvo.org / +44 7976 960739 / Rabobank Foundation – Peter Sluis, P.A.N.Sluis [at] rn.rabobank.nl

Akvo photography is available here.

- ends -

We spent last week in New York finalising our partnership with Live Earth. The Los Angeles-based global climate campaigner and events organiser, famous for organising music concerts, sponsored runs and community events, will be using Akvo’s tools to support global engagement and fundraising.

Above: Akvo founder Thomas Bjelkeman presents to Live Earth’s partners, including Dow Chemical, Global Water Challenge, charity:water and other implementing partners. New York, Wednesday 20 May 2009.

Founded by Emmy-winning producer Kevin Wall, in partnership with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Live Earth is built upon the belief that entertainment has the power to transcend social and cultural barriers to move the world community to action. A for-profit company, Live Earth “seeks to leverage the power of entertainment through integrated events, media, and the live experience to ignite a global movement aimed at solving the most critical environmental issues of our time”.

We’ll be sharing more details about our work together as it happens later this summer. In the meantime, here Mark Charmer talks with Catherine Geanuracos, general manager at Live Earth, on the day we presented to her team and partners in New York. Catherine and Akvo founder Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson describe how they first met and why the partnership is great for us all.

We’ll keep you posted on developments around our work together as the summer progresses, as we build towards some exciting new campaigns.

To coincide with today’s open source publication of Akvo’s video strategy, Vinay Gupta argues in this guest post that “the collision of the internet and the poor is clearly a major turning point in human history, in which we are players”.

The purpose of most television shows is to make you sit through the adverts. It shapes the content and it defines the target audience. The same is true of print media, albeit tempered by journalistic culture.

There’s an inherent tension between the extremely “horizontal” Akvo model and the us-them messaging which dominates traditional ad-funded media stories on the developing world. As an economist in The Hague put it to me recently, “200 years ago, the term New World meant exactly what Developing World means today”.

Focused on being off-message

Akvo has an implicit understanding of this reality – that the developing world is a radical, fast-moving place with nearly unlimited possibilities. It understands that we largely exist to facilitate these people getting organised to get what they want and need out of life. While the immediate business model is to support NGOs that are helping these people, we all share an implicit understanding about who our fundamental customers are.

This presents a very clear “off-message” problem when dealing with mainstream media, who have only the vaguest notions of human life in the poorer areas of the world.

Most of the things that Akvo wants to film have never been filmed before and will not be filmed unless we do it. Below is one example. There is simply no generally-available film of Karamta Village in Gujurat, India, other than what Akvo’s Mark Charmer shot recently when visiting the community with Arghyam and local NGO Sahjeevan. Their faces, and their story, are invisible to the global audience. A few hundred people know the local wells were built, perhaps more if the local NGO is communicating well (and Sahjeevan does). But once that story is recorded in a video that can be linked globally, these people and their village become part of the global discourse on water, on development and on poverty.

The emotional language of the mainstream media message about the developing world is filled with the kinds of things we point scorn at in our private conversations: sad children looking into muddy holes and helpless natives waiting for help. This probably implies that there will always be problems moving the “standard” Akvo content – such as video clips and Really Simple Reporting text and photo updates – into mainstream media through channels like television news, documentaries and “big push” aid extravaganzas because it is profoundly “off message.” The picture Akvo paints – The Woman Who Built Herself a Toilet – breaks the frame. Even positive stories about the developing world carry deeply-ingrained assumptions about western cultural superiority. We need to build and maintain an awareness of these kinds of issues in our communications, not just in terms of what we put out, but in terms of the biases of the organisations we hope will amplify awareness of our activities or carry our messages.

We value the little documentation we have of historically significant events, like the first flights of heavier-than-air craft. The collision of the internet and the poor is clearly a major turning point in human history, in which we are players. Understanding our place – our role, and how it relates to others – is the most important thing we can do right now.

Vinay Gupta is an advisor to Akvo and has been a key figure in the development of the Akvo video process. You can read the Akvo video strategy here on the Akvo Labs website.

You can see more of Akvo’s emerging video work at www.akvo.tv

Our progress through last year is set out in the new Akvo annual report. It contains Jeroen van der Sommen’s perspective on why Akvo matters, lists our core milestones through 2008, and provides a summary of our financial income and expenditure.

You can view the summary and download the 20 page pdf by clicking here.

2008 was quite a year, and 2009 is proving to be even more exciting. I’d like to thank everyone who has helped us get so far, so quickly.

Follow the projects we discuss in Akvo RSR:

> Training on Rope Pump Manufacture
> Development of a mechanical chlorination system
> Improvement of water filter production in Toamasina
> Construction of Ecosan latrines
> Rehabilitation of impluvias with PVC liner
> Training on low cost manual drilling

Akvo partner Practica is starting to use Akvo Really Simple Reporting (RSR) to provide project updates and I’ve been keen to speak to one of the key people driving this at a local community level. Last week, I got to speak with one of the key contributors Stéphan Abric, who coordinates programmes in Madagascar.

Stéphan’s managing three initial Akvo projects, and I hope these will be the first of many. The funds and projects are needed. Madagascar is going through huge political turmoil – the President was recently removed and political instability is impacting on the willingness of donors to fund local projects. “The population is in a really bad situation – in terms of food security, in terms of access to water.”

Madagascar suffers from appalling access to drinking water and sanitation. In normal conditions, just 35 per cent of people can access safe drinking water, in a country of 19.1 million. And things can get much worse, when cyclones and hurricanes hit. Another factor is varied climates – the country varies from tropical areas to deserts in the south, on which less than 100mm of rain falls per year.

You can watch the discussion in full in the video below.

Stéfan and his team have just completed a training workshop on the manufacture of rope pumps. The eight rope pumps that were built during the training are now being installed. Practica provide technical support to the local NGO, VSA. “They’ve completed about eight bore holes,” Stéfan explains. “The work has left everyone very impressed – and there’s now a lot of demand locally from other projects and partners. Practica’s now being asked to help them source more drilling tools.”He’s also excited about a water filter R&D project, that still needs funding. It could have a big impact in Madagascar. This research and development work would develop a gravity-flow chlorination system. The aim is to build out the capacity of local enterprise to research and develop this local gravity flow system.
“The R&D would develop several different gravity flow systems – each able to cover a population of between 2,000 to 15,000 people. The water comes from springs, but they need to find ways to purify it. The idea is to transfer this technology from France to Madagascar and make it work at a low enough cost. But people are very reluctant to fund this kind of research and development project – because at the end when you see the target they say ‘how many people will get water?’ I say no. But in the frame of the project none will, but in the future a lot of people will have access.” Stéfan even thinks he can now cut the budget because he has free access to a Dutch engineering student for a year and they’d like to give him this project. “If we work with this student, we can decrease the budget of this project to about €20,000.”Another project he’s excited about is a water filter production programme. There’s a team that needs work to ‘professionalise’ the production of water filters – they’ve tried to transfer the technology locally but need help. The team has been supported by ICCO to try and develop the business, but now needs technical support to improve quality control of the water filters. “When there is a severe hurricane season, Unicef has to order thousands of water filters from Europe or India. Yet yet we know we can produce these locally.” He’s talked to Unicef, who has told him that if he can guarantee the quality of locally produced filters, they’ll buy locally. In the interview, Stéphan also gives valuable insight on the potential adoption issues involved with Akvo RSR, such as photo and SMS-based updates.

“I like the idea of short reporting where everyone can see online. But the problem is that in the implementation our main financial partner, Aqua for All, has its own administrative regulations. They don’t say ‘it’s enough to see what’s on the Akvo website’. It looks nice, but for administrative purposes we need reporting.”

“This is why in our case, it’s a lot of work. I like this idea of pictures – most of the time there’s no need to write things on reports – it’s better to make pictures, to make drawings… I prefer this sort of thing.”

I also explain the new features in Akvo – how widgets will now spin his project updates out to other websites and also the automatic photo update sizing. We talk too about local phone and web infrastructure.

We talk here too about connectivity. Web connections in Madagascar right now are expensive. His high-speed full-time connection is 80 Euros per month. Low cost access is possible, but it couldn’t support Skype or the transfer of photos. On SMS updates, he explains that farmers will often now have mobile phones, but he’s not right now convinced that SMS will work for updates. A big concern is still the cost of doing SMS, but also he can’t yet see how it will fit into people’s communication patterns. I talk to him about Twitter, and how I think that’s pointing towards new ways that people might soon provide updates.

We also discuss language translation – he’s really keen to see a proper French translation of both the Akvo system (it’s now in English, Dutch and nearly German) and also knowledge contained in Akvopedia (which is all in English-only). He stresses how important the French language is in west Africa.

I spoke with Practica’s Stéphan Abric on Thursday 23 April, 2009.

I’ve been thinking about this conversation with Ian Abbott Donnelly for a month and thought it worth sharing more widely. Ian is European chief technology officer at IBM Big Green Innovations. We first met Ian at Stockholm World Water Week in August 2007.

Ian blew Thomas and I away with some ideas at World World Forum in Istanbul, about radical new ways that data could be organised, to gather knowledge – capturing positive and negative stories – about people’s poor access to water and sanitation.

Ian stressed the sweet spot is small stories – often just short paragraphs about what the issue is, or why something worked as a case study. As he put it:

The clever bit is that you tag these small stories – what kind of story is it? It could be about sanitation or pesticides, or how to pump water effectively from one place to another. You don’t have to have a taxonomy – you let the people who tell the story tag them in whatever way they want to tag them. You also get them to rate it on a scale of one to ten – a ’smiley’ scale of happy to sad faces.

It’s then possible to drill into the data in all kinds of ways, to explore what people actually think about technologies in practice. This points to ways that we can one day process the data coming out through Akvo RSR (Really Simple Reporting) – and it could mean we should consider adding tagging – and smileys – into project updates in a future version.

I think Ian hit on a way that we can create a bridge between Akvopedia and Akvo Really Simple Reporting – enabling ways for anyone to drill down into what people actually think about technologies in practice. There’s potential to go from a rope pump entry in Akvopedia, to a global map of stories about how effectively rope pumps have worked, what the issues have been, etc. And the idea that this could mine the entire Akvo project base – which we hope will eventually feature hundreds of thousands of projects – is an eye-watering idea.

The software that could underpin this comes from a spin-off IBM venture called Cognitive Edge.

I think it’s time to speak to Ian and his guys. If you’re interested in helping us explore it, drop me a line.