Harvesting the Heavens to adapt to Climate Change

Issue

In the Pacific region, climate change is causing serious degradation of the coastal environment and natural resources on which Pacific islanders depend. Increasingly variable rainfall, cyclones, floods, droughts, and decreasing water quality are so significant that they threaten the economic development and the health of their population.

Out with the old and in with the new: Using Akvo to collect and analyse WASH in Fiji schools

Nasautoka District School students. ©UNICEF Pacific/2014/Hing

Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) partners from the Fijian Teachers Association, Fijian Government Ministries, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and civil-society organizations worked energetically over the week to learn to use a tool that will allow them to bypass regular, time-consuming steps in collecting data. From this moment on, WASH partners will no longer rely on pencils to mark responses for a survey, organize tattered papers from the field, nor enter rows of data into a spreadsheet. Instead, they will utilize a phone application called Akvo (which means “Water” in the language Esperanto) in order to administer a survey, plot data points on an interactive map, craft informative analyses, and produce graphs. This all sounds fancy, but what does it mean?