Safe Water for Refugees

WHAT IS THE HUMANITARIAN NEED?

Safe water is essential for preventing the spread of waterborne diseases in refugee and IDP camps, where these diseases are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality. Chlorination is the most widely used water treatment method in humanitarian response globally because it importantly offers residual protection against recontamination.

Current global guidelines (such as Sphere) for water chlorination, however, are not based on evidence from humanitarian field settings and fail to account for the decay in chlorine residual that occurs after water is collected from the distribution point, taken home, and stored before use. This post-distribution chlorine decay is highly dependent on site-specific factors, so a one-size-fits-all universal chlorination target is inadequate for ensuring drinking water safety across the wide range of settings encountered globally. Several studies have linked the widespread recontamination of drinking water after distribution to the spread of waterborne diseases in camp populations.

WHAT APPROACH ARE YOU TAKING TO BUILDING EVIDENCE AND HOW WILL IT HELP YOUR PROJECT TO SCALE?

We created the Safe Water Optimization Tool (SWOT), a web-based platform that generates site-specific and evidence-based water chlorination targets, to ensure water remains safe to drink all the way to the point of consumption. The SWOT uses machine-learning and numerical modelling to generate insight from water quality monitoring data already routinely collected in refugee and IDP camps. We pilot-tested the SWOT in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps in Bangladesh in 2019 and found that it produced substantive improvements in household water safety compared to the status quo chlorination guidelines.   

In this project, we aim to build evidence that will support the scaling of the SWOT across the global humanitarian sector. Using a mixed-methods approach, we will: 

1. Evaluate the SWOT in three new humanitarian water supply use cases—water trucking, medical facilities, and surface water supplies 
2. Improve the robustness of the SWOT’s numerical and machine-learning modelling tools 
3. Generate insights on how to improve the tool’s use-ability and functionality by learning from field users 
4. Create rapid tools for evaluating chlorine taste and odour acceptance thresholds and for characterising disinfection by-products in humanitarian water supply projects 

WHAT ARE THE EXPECTED OUTCOMES?

This project will produce an improved SWOT web tool and a suite of evidence-based resources to support its global scale-up, including: 

1. Case study demonstrations of the SWOT for ensuring point of consumption water safety in three new water supply use cases  
2. An improved web tool featuring enhanced modelling that can generate insight while lowering data collection requirements, plus an improved user experience/interface (UX/UI) based on user feedback 
3. New rapid tools for evaluating chlorine taste and odour acceptance thresholds and for characterising disinfection by-products, all of which will become part of the SWOT toolkit 
4. A suite of evidence-based guidance and advocacy resources detailing the role the SWOT can play in emergency water supply programmes, targeted to field users, managers, advisors, coordination bodies, and donors 

These outputs will take the form of research publications, conference presentations, technical memoranda, case studies, training webinars, policy briefs, and other resources to support the scaling of the SWOT with diverse user groups in the humanitarian sector.