Hello and welcome to our MOOC on water supply and sanitation policy in developing countries, part one. My name is Dale Whittington, I'm a professor at the Alliance Manchester Business School in the UK and at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the United States. This is the first of a sequence of two MOOCs. This part one is subtitled understanding complex problems. We believe that understanding global water and sanitation issues must start with acknowledging that this is a complex problem. We need to recognize that there are no simple answers when data and information or sometimes missing or controversial. Social, cultural, historical, political, economic, and technical factors all interact. And causal links between policy interventions and outcomes are unclear. >> Hello, I'm Duncan Thomas, a research fellow at the Alliance Manchester Business School and I'm co-teaching this MOOC with Professor Whittington. In this MOOC you'll develop skills to understand the scale and significance of current conditions and trends in water and sanitation services. In the mega cities, peri-urban slums and rural communities of the global south. All of us know something about water and sanitation issues, because they're part of our daily lives. But poor household in developing countries face very different conditions than households in high income, industrialized countries. >> Hundreds of millions of people still like access to improve water supplies. And about two billion do not have improved sanitation services. Current water and sanitation conditions probably cause over a million avoidable deaths each year from water related diseases. Millions of dollars are spent on avoidable healthcare expenditures. And people, mostly women and children, spend billions of hours carrying water from sources outside their home and walking away from their home to defecate. Understanding the complex problems embedded in the status quo conditions is a vital, preliminary step before one tries to formulate policy interventions to improve matters. We will examine effective interventions to address problems of poor water and sanitation services in part two, the second of this sequence of two MOOCs. >> There are many different pieces of the global water and sanitation puzzle. To make sense of these, we'll present to you a simple conceptual framework that's helpful to tackle complex policy problems. We use this framework to organize the six sessions of material in this MOOC. This framework also explains how the two MOOC parts in this sequence fit together. The first step in any policy analysis is what we term problem diagnosis. Problem diagnosis requires understanding status quo or baseline conditions, the political, economic, and technical realities that are part of today's world. This helps us understand what's going on now, and how did we get here. >> In the water and sanitation sector, understanding status quo conditions means we want to know how people are getting their water and sanitation services today. We want to know how much they're paying for these services, how healthy they are, and what hygiene practices are being followed. And we want to understand the motivations and incentives of the various institutions and stakeholders that are involved in the sector. But status quo conditions are not static, they're changing due to population and economic growth, technological innovation, climate change and other factors. These factors are occurring before we intervene with any policies to improved water and sanitation conditions. They indicate where the world is headed without any policy interventions. And are also vital to understand in order to assess effective policy interventions. >> This MOOC starts by giving you this essential foundation. In the first session, you'll learn the key facts about water and sanitation, and where the most serious water and sanitation problems are globally. In our second session, you'll then encounter the political economy of the provision of water supply and sanitation services in developing countries. Together we'll look at water vending markets and corruption in the provision of water and sanitation services. >> Our third session addresses the supply side, the cost of technologies associated with piped and non piped water in sanitation systems. In the fourth session, we will study the demand side, to understand household demand for improved water and sanitation services. In our fifth session, we'll examine the health and non health consequences of improved water and sanitation services. We will also look at the impacts of climate change on health and how climate change affects water utilities. In our six and final session, we'll introduce you to what we call water development paths. This helps us understand and compare the sequence of choices different communities have made and may make in the future to improve their water and sanitation services. I bring to this MOOC over 40 years of career experience working on water and sanitation policy, and planning issues in low and middle income countries. Working with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, OECD, and the United States Agency for International Development, I've investigated water and sanitation problems in over 25 countries. And in Stockholm, Sweden, I've served on the technical committee of the Global Water Partnership, which has endorsed this MOOC. >> I'm going to bring a comparative perspective based on my 15 years of researching about practices in water policy, regulation and innovation in the UK and Europe. The MOOC itself will have video lectures and interactive elements. And you'll have the opportunity to read and discuss some of the most influential, thought provoking papers on water and sanitation. We use case studies from many different developing countries. And we share with you some documentary videos that show what different individual and organizations around the world think are important status quo water sanitation and conditions, and how they think these can be changed. We also interview leading experts from around the world to give you an insider's view on water and sanitation challenges. >> This MOOC will help you develop skills to tackle a complex controversial policy problem and you'll undertake a challenging and practical decision oriented assignment You'll be able to discuss with fellow learners from different backgrounds and countries. Although we address global water and sanitation challenges, the skills and ways of thinking you will develop during this MOOC will not be limited to this one topic. The tools you will learn will be transferable to many other policy problems. We look forward to you joining us for this MOOC.
