Hello, and welcome to this MOOC on water supply and sanitation policy in developing countries. This is part two entitled Developing Effective Policy Interventions. My name is Dale Whittington and I'm a professor at the Alliance Manchester Business School in the UK and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States. And I'm a visiting professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. >> Hello, I'm Duncan Thomas, electorate at the Alliance Manchester Business School. In this MOOC, we're going to help you to understand the political, economic, social, and technical dimensions of some of the most promising policy interventions that have been proposed to solve global water and sanitation problems. This is important because about half a billion people on our planet still lack access to improved water supplies. And about 2 billion do not have improved sanitation services. >> In this part two, we will look at some of the policy interventions that donors, national governments and water utilities have tried to improve water and sanitation conditions around the world. We'll critically study what lessons can be learned from these experiences. Current water and sanitation conditions cause an unknown but very large number of avoidable deaths each year from water related diseases. Millions of dollars are spent on avoidable healthcare expenses and billions of hours are wasted by people, mostly women, carrying water from sources outside the home. Reducing these huge costs associated with poor water and sanitation services is one of the major global challenges for us all in the 21st century. >> Technologies to provide network water and sanitation services are well known. But for decades the international community and national government have struggled to find the right institutional and financial arrangements to provide these technologies to poor households in developing countries. >> This MOOC is therefore not a simple overview of technologies that could be used to improve water and sanitation conditions around the world. In megacities, peri-urban slums and rural communities. We must look at how efforts to improve water and sanitation conditions are embedded in institutions and guided by policy. >> In this part two, we'll examine six main types of water and sanitation policy interventions, spread across seven sessions of content. We'll first discuss why policy interventions in the water and sanitation sector have been so challenging to solve. We introduce the notion of ancient instincts about water and sanitation. Our species developed these many thousands of years ago while we were hunter gatherers. But we still carry these ancient instincts with us today, and they greatly affect how we respond to different policy interventions designed to improve poor water and sanitation conditions. >> In our second session, we will look at different approaches to planning water supply programs in the rural areas of low-income countries, where many of the poorest households without improved water and sanitation services live. In the third session, we'll address the question of how prices and tariffs can be designed to improve service delivery. And we will also look at the question of how to improve the delivery of subsidies to poor households. In the fourth session, we will consider the provision of information to households as a type of policy intervention that can be used to improve water and sanitation conditions. Different kinds of information may enable households to make better decisions about their water and sanitation behaviors. >> In our fifth session, we'll look at the policy option of changing institutions as a way of improving water and sanitation services. Specifically, we'll examine the often controversial policy option of involving the private sector in the delivery of water and sanitation services and examine different deal structures for involving private actors in the sector. And in our sixth session, we'll continue our discussion of water privatization and look at the UK water privatization experience, perhaps the world's most ambitious water privatization. Then in our final seventh session, we'll discuss regulation of water utilities which typically goes hand in hand with privatization. We will again focus on the UK case and examine its innovative approach to water regulation. >> I've spent over 40 years of my career studying water and sanitation policy and planning issues in low and middle income countries. I've worked on these issues in over 25 countries for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the OCD, and United States Agency for International Development. And I've served on the technical committee of the Global Water Partnership in Stockholm, Sweden. And the Global Water Partnership has endorsed this MOOC. I'm also chair of the Board of the Environment for Development Network based in Gothenburg, Sweden. We have the EFD research centers in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Africa, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chili, India, China and Vietnam with active research programs in environmental policy issues including water and sanitation. >> I've researched water and innovation issues for around 15 years, and I've advised leaders, water sector suppliers, regulators and policymakers in the UK and Europe. >> Our MOOC features video lectures and interactive elements, and you'll get to read some of the most influential, thought provoking papers in this field. We will discuss case studies from many different developing countries, and then we will use these cases to illustrate available evidence about the effectiveness of different policy interventions. You will also be able to watch interviews with leading water and sanitation experts from around the world about the challenging situations they face and the policy interventions they think are most effective. >> In this MOOC, we hope you'll develop skills to understand how to tackle a complex, controversial policy problem, one that has no simple easy answers. You'll learn that the evidence policymakers need is sometimes missing or controversial. You'll be able to assess better the quality of evidence and how to reach sound policy relevant conclusions. And you'll discuss issues with your fellow learners who may have very different perspectives from yours on the global water and sanitation challenges and the effectiveness of different policy interventions. >> Our part one MOOC on water and sanitation was first offered in 2014. Over 17,000 learners from around 185 countries joined us. If you were one of them, we look forward to welcoming you back for this part two. If you have not already taken part one, you're still very welcome to start with part two. However, you will find that part two relies on a conceptual framework for policy analysis that we introduced in part one. So you may want to take part one before starting this part two. It's entirely up to you. We hope you enjoy this MOOC.
