Completed Projects
Research Area: Infrastructure policy & planning
More than two-thirds of the population in Africa must leave their home to fetch water for drinking and domestic use. It is estimated that some 40 billion hours of labor each year are spent hauling water, a responsibility often borne by women and children. Cutting the walking time to a water source by just 15 minutes can reduce under-five mortality of children by 11 percent, and slash the prevalence of nutrition-depleting diarrhea by 41 percent.
Research Area: Sanitation & wastewater
WHD is the Strategy Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) partner, supporting the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation (CNHF)’s water team. The project is focused on evaluating CNHF's efforts to implement a Safe Water Strategy as efficiently and effectively as possible. Stanford’s analyses will be based on input gathered from other grantees, non-grantee collaborators and stakeholders in the broader water sector.
Research Area: Food security
In the northern region of Benin, in the Sudano-Sahel region of West Africa, the dry season between rains can last six to nine months at a time. Because most of Benin’s smallholder farmers rely on rain-fed agriculture for both their food supply and their income, the dry season can be a time not only of food insecurity but of poverty, illness and malnutrition. Groundwater is often too deep for traditional wells to reach, and the high price of fuel makes it difficult to rely on electric irrigation pumps.
Research Area: Infrastructure policy & planning
The objectives of this research are to assess the demand among water user committees and water users for reliable boreholes with handpumps provided by the EverFlow maintenance service. We will also quantify the financial and economic costs and benefits of the EverFlow maintenance service to water users, communities, and local government. The project will contribute new knowledge that informs scaling up EverFlow, and that helps establish the conditions under which such market-based approaches can help address sustainability of rural water infrastructure for the broader sector.
Research Area: Urban service delivery, Sanitation & wastewater
Better understanding of how household and community sanitation affects child exposure to fecal contamination and diarrheal pathogens could improve the design of sanitation interventions in low-income urban communities. This project includes a case-control study to assess observable household and community sanitation characteristics as risk factors for child clinical diarrhea cases. It also includes an in-depth microbial sampling component to measure environmental fecal contamination among households with varying sanitation service levels.
