Big Question: Symptomatic Water-Borne Diseases

BIG QUESTION

Listen up, loyal readers, because it's "Big Question" time! This is your chance to aid us in our water health project here in Hubli, Karnataka. The situation is as follows:

Besides simply cleaning water (a mundane, if not important humanitarian project), a huge focus of our project is using the "data informatics" software to remotely track the effectiveness of our health/sanitation education and water treatment interventions (i.e. teaching people about water sanitation and water filters that we give them).

Data will be entered into the software here in India, and then over the course of the year, from the comfort of USC in Los Angeles, we will be able to monitor certain data.

The question is:

"What kind of data should be recorded throughout the year? What are the symptoms (besides Diarrhea) of water-borne diseases (that an Indian student trained to perform follow-up visits for our project) can ask a head of household during their monthly visits?

Community vs. Household Systems - Advantages & Disadvantages

One of the big issues that the water management portion of our project faces is the decision of whether to implement community or household systems.

Household systems are maintained by individual families. Each family is responsible for their system and their system only.

Advantages:

• promotes independence
• family understands the value of their system
• those who benefit = those who are responsible (high incentives for maintenance)

Disadvantages:

• household systems don't benefit from scale
• poorest households may not be able to afford
• elderly households without children may have trouble with maintenance

Community systems are maintained by the community. Responsibility may lie with a single individual or council or a rotating group.

Advantages:

• benefits from scale (i.e. bigger systems sometimes offer lower price per person)
• promotes a sense of community
• only one system to maintain
  

Disadvantages:

• enables free riders (people who benefit but do no work)
• can create hierarchies (those who maintain the system have power over those who don't)

This a very rudimentary treatment of the problem as I have only just begun to explore the issue. I'm sure many of you out there have asked yourself this same question though so please share your experiences!