Broken Pumps and Promises Incentivizing Impact in Environmental Health

This volume highlights some of the challenges in delivering effective environmental health interventions, and presents examples of emergent theories and case studies that can help close the gap between intent and impact. These include impact crediting systems, objective evidence gathering tools, and social businesses that service environmental health. The case studies presented cross disciplines, scales, organizational and national boundaries and can defy easy categorization. A water project may be designed for a health impact, but financed with a climate change tool, and leverage high tech cell phone sensors. A cookstove program may be primarily concerned with employment and capacity building, but balance environmental and health concerns.

Presently, the impact of interventions may not always be aligned to the intent sought. In this book, readers will discover alternative ways to move the mindset of funders and implementers toward pay-for-performance models of humanitarian and environmental interventions. Undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, global health, appropriate technology, international development and development engineering would benefit from these increasingly non-traditional case studies that challenge commonly accepted presentations of poverty reduction and social enterprise.

Introduction.- Performance Over Promises.-  Trade-offs and Risks in Results Based Approaches.- How Feedback Loops Can Improve Aid and Governance.- Intent To Impact – Diluted Safe Water Monitoring.- Mobilizing Payments for Water Service Sustainability.- Enabling Ecological Restoration Through Quantification.- Incentivizing Impact – Privately Financed Public Health in Rwanda.- A Critical Review of Carbon Credits for Household Water Treatment.- HAPIT, the Household Air Pollution Intervention Tool.- Innovations in Payments for Health Benefits of Improved Cookstoves.- The Role of Mobile in Delivering Sanitation Services.- Combining Sensors and Ethnography to Evaluate Latrine Use In India.- Sustainable Sanitation Provision in Urban Slums – The Sanergy Case Study.- Pay for Performance Energy Access Market.