How Mobile Games Can Help Improve Sanitation

More than 2.5 billion people, many of them in Africa and South Asia, face grave sanitation challenges. In many of these countries, people are more likely to own a cell phone than a toilet.  Therefore  there is an obvious opportunity to use mobile technology to promote the use of sanitation and good hygiene in order to make a substantial impact. Mobile phones in Kenya transfer money; Bangladeshis listen to English language classes on their phones; and in Ghana, women entrepreneurs use mobiles to market their wares.

The growing Games for Change industry applies principles of traditional social games to address specific challenges . For example, in the UK,  Channel 4 commissioned the game developer Playniac to build an online game to improve financial literacy among the 50% of young Britons who are heavily in debt. In Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, young developers have built iPhone, Android, and Javascript games based on local storylines. Pledge 51, a Nigerian developer group, recently released Danfo, a game where the user plays as a bus driver coping with dense Nigerian traffic.

Hattery Labs has begun to explore how games might improve sanitation practices. The typical game-players in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are young urban males who own smartphones, but many of the communities that face the greatest sanitation challenges have less advanced technology. However, Javascript games built for Nokia S40 phones (among the most popular handsets in the developing world) provide an opportunity to send a compelling message on good behavior practices in sanitation and hygiene.  A full report on how games can promote good sanitation and behavior practice is HERE.

Here are a few game ideas that might prove effective:

Soap Wars makes hand-washing an entertaining challenge where players use the soap dispenser as a weapon against dangerous germs.

Sanitation Heroes engages players in the process of sanitation maintenance from capturing, transporting, and disposing of feces to reusing it as fertilizer. It features different scenarios in a memory game that prompts the player to match the solution to each different stage of capturing and treating waste.

Toilet Hunt introduces obstacles along the course of finding a safe place to go to the bathroom. As the player searches for sanitary latrines on a basic map, they must use the clues to decide whether the latrine is safe.

There are outstanding questions that the current research hasn’t resolved:

How does the game appeal to illiterate players, who need rich visual descriptions and narratives to guide the gameplay? The need for rich imagery does not necessarily match the small, low-resolution screens of Nokia S40 phones.

How does the game appeal to women, who are critical participants in sanitation  but don’t represent the largest percentage of mobile game players? One initial idea is to frame sanitation storylines as mobile ‘comic books’, allowing users to scroll through an interesting narrative with subtle sanitation and hygiene messages.

How can the lessons from the game translate to rural areas, where there are fewer who can access it and more who face the challenges that it seeks to mitigate? Urban users might take their phone with them to their home village and share it with their friends and family, who will begin playing the game and continue to play out the game’s storyline in real life.

Finally, how can the game measure its impact on sanitation behavior? User adoption and engagement in this context is a false metric to evaluate impact since users might play the game but have their behavior unchanged. Any solution to measure impact should combine a mobile game with other digital and non-digital applications that help users track their sanitation use alongside their game success. Local developers can work in partnership with games for change experts, community organizations, and telecommunications companies to test these approaches.

This report explores the potential of using mobile games to engage citizens in addressing persistent community challenges but we want to hear from you.  Is this an effective way to engage target populations?  Are there other ideas for how games can impact behavior change?  Would you play these games?


Source:- http://www.impatientoptimists.org/en/Posts/2012/06/How-mobile-games-can-help-improve-sanitation

Sanitation project in limbo in West Bengal,India

With the Hubli-Dharwad Municipal Corporation (HDMC) delaying identifying beneficiaries for the integrated sanitation programme, people living below the poverty line in the twin cities are once again being denied the opportunity to live a better life.

Even two years after the project was launched, the HDMC has not shown much interest to complete the survey of beneficiaries on time and submit a report to the government to fast-track the proceedings.


In the absence of proper sanitation facilities, these people of a lesser god are forced to go through the ignominy of attending nature's call in the open and living in unhygienic conditions.

The much-hyped sanitation programme, funded by both the central government and the state government, is aimed at providing toilet facilities for all the BPL families.

In 2009, the municipal corporations in the state were asked to conduct a survey to identify the beneficiaries and submit a report to the government. Under the project, each family will get Rs 9,000 for the construction ofa toilet and another Rs 1,000, if they do not have a safety tank.

According to sources, the NGO, which was vested with the responsibility to conduct the door-to-door survey, has abandoned the project abruptly citing difficulty in getting documents from people. Though it undertook the work in 2010, it made no headway.

The corporation is now planning to call fresh tenders for the survey.

NGO head Gurushantappa told TOI that they covered 5,000 BPL families during the survey and found it difficult to collect all the documents from them.

"If the corporation is ready to give the work again, we will finish it soon," he claimed.

HDMC special officer S H Naregal admitted that there is a delay in the process as the NGO failed to collect all the required details from the beneficiaries.




Source :- http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-07-06/hubli/32565407_1_hdmc-hubli-dharwad-municipal-corporation-sanitation-project