Regular monitoring of drinking water quality is an essential step to manage and protect water supplies from potential causes of contamination and to develop treatment measures. Despite this need, there is a lack of regular operational water quality monitoring in many parts of the world, particularly in rural areas of low- and middle-income countries.

Sandec’s Water Supply and Treatment group (WST), Helvetas Nepal, FundiFix and SafePani partnered with the REACH programme led by Oxford University to analyse how fit-for-purpose (FFP) laboratories can support reliable water quality monitoring and operational management of rural water systems. “FFP labs are important because they ensure a regular monitoring of water quality and help to rapidly identify contamination so that proactive responses can be implemented to improve water safety,” explains Marisa Boller, Project Officer in the WST research group of the aquatic research institute Eawag.

Laboratories set up to assess adaptation in local contexts

The REACHLabs project examined FFP laboratories in Nepal in partnership with Helvetas Nepal, in Kenya with FundiFix and in Bangladesh with SafePani. One aim was to assess how the labs are being adapted to local contexts to support the local water service providers and respond to risks in an informed and timely manner. The local circumstances largely determined such factors as the testing capacities of the labs, their power supplies and management arrangements. For example, in Nepal, water users themselves often engaged in monitoring and management activities, whereas in Kenya and Bangladesh, professional service providers handled these aspects.

“The goal of the REACHLabs project is to identify water quality issues at the local context and develop a setup to conduct water quality monitoring with reasonably priced local resources,” explains Bal Mukunda Kunwar, Research and Development Specialist at Helvetas Nepal. There was wide variability in water infrastructure arrangements across the study countries. In Nepal, households had gravity-fed piped water supplies from spring sources, while in Kenya communities were served by boreholes. In Bangladesh, households accessed deep tube wells with hand pumps and small-piped supplies. “The treatment methods would be adapted to eliminate the contamination threats found in the local context,” says Kunwar.