Susan Davis

By Susan Davis, Executive Director, Improve International

Rob Bell is the Executive Director at El Porvenir (Managua, Nicaragua).  We talked over licuados (a sort of fruit milkshake) at a vegetarian restaurant in Managua called Ananda on July 1^st. El Porvenir works on water, sanitation, hygiene education and reforestation in rural communities in Nicaragua. They are beginning the process of preparing their next strategic plan. The conversation below is excerpted from our 45 minute conversation about how their programming has evolved over time.

We’re always tweaking and improving everything.

Susan: Do you have a sense of functionality of the water systems built by El Porvenir?

Rob: In 2004 we did an evaluation and the study showed something like 74% of the water projects were working. I would guess at that time it was 450 [wells and water systems]. Now we’ve got close to 900.

Susan:  Of the water systems that weren’t working, was there a common reason?

Rob:  It was a few things. It was a different rope pump at that time so some of them were 14 years old and that was the end of life. In some cases, key people [who knew how to fix the pump] had moved away. Before 2004 we didn’t have a hygiene education program; within our hygiene education program is also our maintenance education. A lot of our hygiene education was created because of the study we did in 2004.

Susan: That’s a great example of how data can show you what to change.

Rob: Exactly. Another group of volunteers just did [a survey]. What they gave us focused a lot on our hygiene education program because his background was in teaching. It’s kind of handy, because we’ve always felt that was our most important program: the hygiene and maintenance piece. Because if you have a fancy latrine and a beautiful well but you’re not washing your hands, you’re not really doing that much. And if you don’t know how to maintain that rope pump or that water system it’s not going to last more than a few years. So I really feel that [education is] key; the fact that he’s focusing on that is going to be really good.

[Another improvement is] our train the trainer program which we started maybe 4 years ago now. Instead of our staff trying to directly train 5,000 people, right now we have about 500 trained trainers. And these 500 reach out to the 5,000. We reached about 10,000 people last year with hygiene education directly from our staff or one of our volunteer trainers. One thing [the researcher] was talking about is we don’t have any real incentives for all these volunteers. [He suggested providing] cell phone credit: give the [trainers] 50 cordobas every couple months when they bring in the results of what they’re doing.

Susan: Have there been other changes to the program?

Rob: The rope pump itself has changed over time. In the early pumps,  the bicycle wheel where the rope goes around in the crane used to be wide open to the elements Then they put a little cover on top [that] covered it from the rain and sun. Now the current design is the whole wheel well is covered. You can take the top off and do maintenance but it’s protected from the elements. And now, especially in Camoapa, the communities themselves have taken the initiative to build a little shelter over top of it to help it last a lot longer and also provide for the women some shelter from the elements when they’re pumping the water.

Almost everything we do has come about as we learn things over time. We started with just water, then it was water & sanitation because we saw people were practicing open defecation and contaminating our wells, so we better do something. Then we added our reforestation and watershed protection program because we were seeing that water tables were dropping in our wells, those were drying up. In Nicaragua in general – in the last 50 years, has lost 49% of its forest cover.

Susan: On the reforestation side, how do you measure success? 

Rob: I haven’t found a good indicator yet. We’re just looking at what the water level is in the well. The water level will vary during the year, so it’s difficult to really compare one year to the next.  We’re trying to incorporate into the FLOW survey so that’s a regular piece of data we collect.

[Another] thing that’s changed over time as well, is how we’re doing our reforestation. At first it was, well “there’s nothing over there, we’ll put a tree there.”  It mostly had to do with where people had land available to give to us. Now we are trying to plant trees more strategically – around river banks and higher up in the watershed, so more more rain is absorbed.

Susan: How do they know whose trees are whose? Do they put a label on them?

Rob: We didn’t used to but now we put a little sign on them.  They’re not fancy signs, just hand painted.  One other thing that we are trying to change is we used to just measure what we’ve planted, but we haven’t really tracked what’s surviving. We’re nearing around 1,000,000 trees planted. The staff is recruiting our community members to [find out] how many are really there and which species are doing better in which areas. What are the [best] conditions, in a shadier plot or a sunnier plot?

Susan: With your education programs in particular you have an ongoing relationship with the communities.  Have you gotten feedback, requests, demands, suggestions from the communities that have resulted in changes to the programs?

Rob: A lot of our stuff does come from communities for sure.  Community washing/ bathing stations came from the community requests. Latrines were a community request. [At first] we said ”we don’t do that; we do water” but the communities were insisting.

Susan: So what’s the future for El Porvenir?

Rob: Well, you know El Porvenir means “the future” [laughs].  We’re about to redo our strategic plan. In 2013 our [current] strategic plan is finishing. So a year out we’re trying to evaluate and think ahead to the next plan. What’s the future? I think watershed protection is going to grow and be a big piece for the next number of years, and take on more importance.

We’re getting there with sustainability in our latrines but we still have more to do there. We have the double pits. We’ll be collecting data over the next 2-3-5 years and that will tell us how sustainable that solution really is.

We’re always tweaking and improving everything.