Data Collection in Las Mercedes

Over the past week, our team surveyed and enrolled nearly 80 families in Las Mercedes in our comparative sanitation study. Half of these families will receive a pour/flush toilet, and the other half will receive an ecological sanitation toilet - with the ability to reuse the by-products as fertilizer. These will be randomly assigned to households later this week.

After our training on Monday we had more volunteers than we could handle! We ended up utilizing two teams of 6 health workers to carry out the surveys in the community over 3 days.

 

Our staff overlapped with them to ensure they felt comfortable with the survey and the technology --- but they were eager to get out there and collect data on their own! Most of them are familiar with conducting health surveys as part of their duties.

 

We couldn't have accomplished this without the hard work and investment from the clinic staff - and they were equally grateful to help their community. Going forward, we plan to conduct quarterly follow-up surveys with the families who received latrines to better understand their perceptions and experiences, and hopefully use that to inform success indicators for either sanitation model - so that we as an organization can better understand the potential benefits of ecological sanitation, and when it is appropriate.

Stay tuned for more updates on the study - including a refresher overview on why this research is so crucial and results! Thank you again for your support. We are happy to be able to provide these families with safe and dignified sanitation.