On 2-5 May the Water-WISER students and staff decamped to The World Forum conference centre in The Hague, Netherlands, for the IRC All Systems Connect 2023 conference.

This annual event is a huge (>700 attendees) meeting forum for WASH experts, policymakers and businesses, with the focus on connecting up silos and holistic thinking.

The All Systems event itself lasted 3 days, and included sessions chaired and developed by Water-WISER CDT students in a formal collaboration. Workshops and ‘sprints’ ranged from climate change solutions to financing WASH projects. Spurthi (pictured) had a high-profile role in the youth ‘sprint’ on climate change and WASH.

President Zhelensky turned up during the conference, with lots of security, meaning the Water-WISER group had to eat breakfast out of a bag that morning!

After the close of the IRC event, the Water-WISER group met at Het Nutshuis (IRC offices) in the city centre for a reflective workshop. J’Anna Lue and Euphresia Luseka, guest speakers, talked on positionality and decolonising research and the event was joined by international researchers from outside Water-WISER.

Photo credits: Robert Tjalondo (Rockin’ Pictures) for IRC

In November 2022, a series of events was organised by STEM Schools across the University of Loughborough in the week leading up to the International Day of LGBTQIA+ people in STEM. The theme of the week was ‘Educate, Celebrate and Support’, and was aimed at staff and students who identify as LGBT+ or are allies.

Within the events series, a group of researchers from the Water-WISER CDT hosted a workshop entitled ‘Safeguarding Queer Identities in Research’. Georgia Hales, Hannah Robinson and Zhe Zhan (CDT-aligned student at Leeds) talked about the relevance of LGBT+ identities within research undertaken across the CDT. They cited examples from their own experience and research and covered topics including inclusive terminology in public health policy relating to gender, how gender affects access to, and use of, water and sanitation services, and collecting data from LGBT+ participants. They also looked at issues of safeguarding for LGBT+ researchers conducting fieldwork.

My project focused on developing a methodology for spatially representing sanitation systems in unsewered cities in the global south. I have spent three weeks over the months of July and August 2022 doing fieldwork to validate a prototype developed using open-source data for a small area of Rajshahi city in northwest Bangladesh. The sole sanitation system in this city is comprised of individually controlled and maintained onsite septic tanks and pits.

The aim of the fieldwork was to find out how effective the methodology is at mapping faecal matter sources and their movement. The informal usage of the city’s storm drainage network is the way of supernatant fluid movement; in some situations or in certain portions (older part) of the city, faecal solids are also carried out of the city via those drains.

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On Saturday 7th¬†May, Water-WISER students Karl Jones, Hannah Ritchie and Lais Dos Santos took part in the Be Curious festival of science at Leeds. This is an annual event where the University of Leeds opens up to over 1000 members of the public (mainly families with small children) to come and get hands-on with science. It’s an inspiring celebration of public engagement with hundreds of activities on offer.

Visitors to Water-WISER had to hook poo out of a tub of water, while learning all about hand washing and research into water purification. The game was really hard, even for adults! Luckily all the children kept a laser focus on removing all the poo, patiently waiting their turn and with hardly a tantrum in sight!

My PhD project is based on sand dams: small, concrete structures constructed across ephemeral streams, behind which sand accumulates, in which water is stored from the rainy season for use in the dry season. I am exploring the causes and impacts of lateral, longitudinal, and vertical losses of the water stored in sand dams to the sub-surface environment.

In 2022, I spent two months in Southeast Kenya in the short dry season (January – March), working on three dams being constructed that season and three mature dams. A lot of my time was spent collecting geophysical data, which we used to image the subsurface up to 25-30m deep, and data to constrain the geophysics, such as topography, water levels, rock depth, and soil profiles.

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This year’s Challenge Event took place at the Chevin Country Park Hotel near Leeds. Postponed from January due to the Omicron covid variant surge in infections, the event was intended to bring everyone together in person for presentations skills training and networking.
The event started on the first evening with a team-building short walk to Surprise View on Otley Chevin – a traditional photo opportunity for CDT groups.

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Mariam Zaqout, a CDT-aligned student, won the Water @ Leeds Spring Award, an impressive achievement as this is open to several hundred researchers. She also won ‘Best Paper’ at the 2021 WaterAid Research Awards for the paper Sustainable sanitation jobs: prospects for enhancing the livelihoods of pit-emptiers in Bangladesh (2021), Third World Quarterly.

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A new collaboration has been forged via an alumni donation of funding, where Bushra Hasan of the Water-WISER CDT has linked with a student in the Fluid Dynamics CDT at Leeds on complementary projects looking at Covid and airborne transmission, particularly linked to public sanitation facilities.

Professor Barbara Evans (director of the Water-WISER CDT) put Ruth Sylvester Georgia Hales in contact with Kimberly Worsham, founder and director of FLUSH, an American sanitation and hygiene education, advocacy, and consultancy organisation. Kim needed extra help with data collection: demographic data on 1472 global sanitation leaders across 105 organisations. The resulting paper was published in Sage’s Environmental Health insights journal in July 2021 and the work has been presented via poster at the Colorado WASH Symposium in March 2021 and via presentation at the WEDC conference in September 2021.

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On 22-25 June 2021, students and staff from the Water-WISER CDT gathered at Cranfield University for our first in-person event since the pandemic began.

The ‘Challenge Event’ normally focuses on activities designed to give students skills in problem-solving, team working and networking, in a variety of outdoor settings. The annual event brings together the full cohort of students from each university – Leeds, Loughborough, Cranfield.

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Congratulations to Hannah Ritchie! Hannah is our first Water-WISER CDT student to submit a paper (within her second year of study on the CDT programme). Hannah’s paper “Sand dams as a potential solution to rural water security in drylands: Existing research and future opportunities” will be published in the Journal Frontiers in Water, section Water and Climate. Hannah is currently on a prestigious internship at the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (OOSA) working on water resource issues.

The Water-WISER CDT Challenge Week 2020 took place in Youlgreave in the Peak District, 7-10 January 2020, involving all Water-WISER CDT students, aligned PhD students, the Water-WISER CDT academic management team and a selection of industry representatives and experts.

This annual event is designed as a cohort-building activity for the CDT students, as well as a networking experience.

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