Lessions learnt and Conclusion

Making the state officials in the water & health sections at provincial level aware on SODIS is helpful in convincing people.

Introducing both glass bottles & PET bottles together & making the users to choose what is best is appropriate especially in places where the PET bottles are not abundant.

Though SODIS would be incorporated in other integrated projects, there should be at least one full time field officer only for SODIS recruited either by COSI or the partner organization.

SODIS activities should be started in parallel or initially with the schools in the area. Introducing SODIS in schools is more promising & this should be done by interactive discussion with students incorporated in similar subject matter like science, health.

Each advantage of using SODIS should be highlighted when promoting SODIS since reducing water related diseases in not the only fact that strike users accord.

SODIS implementation under each partner organization began in August 2002. The field activities were scheduled to start by October once the training & preparation of promotional materials were over. Unfortunately, an extensive rainy season was experienced from October to end December last year & this has been an unexpected weather situation after few decades. The field activities in all the areas were postponed to beginning of January since end December also was not a good time to organize anything because of the festive season.

The mid-term review meeting & the monitoring visit of SANDEC were postponed to February 2003 accordingly. The interactive review meeting with the participation of 7 partner organizations & schools that held in the second week of February 2003 has been a milestone in SODIS activities. It helped COSI & other organizations to review the lessons learnt & to re-set the future activities with a steady plan. The information sharing with SANDEC was highly valuable too.

The proposed targets were compared with achieved & with the strengths & weaknesses of the organizations. COSI came up with a new target of achieving 1010 families by June 2003. This was decided with the intention of achieving the initially set target of 5000 families by mid 2004.

The necessity of a steady bottle supply scheme, implementing an effective monitoring system, carrying out the need assessment for prospective users properly & promoting SODIS among state officials were identified as main tasks to perform immediately in the year 2003.

Feedback formats to measure the efficiency & effectiveness was developed & the progress of field activities was reviewed monthly. Also, the provincial level promotional programmes with the participation of state officials, SODIS staff & users were seemed appropriate & helped to convince new users. That resulted the proper achievement of targets by June 2003 (1258 regular users) & a satisfactory growth by September 2003 (2148 regular users)

COSI believes that the latter part of this year is the most critical time of improving & strengthening the field activities. Partner Organizations are confident that the final target could be achieved without any difficulty if the necessary assistance is continued.