International DAAD Alumni Summer School: „Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor - Natural hazards, climate change, governance and human rights”
In informal settlements of mega cities of
Sub-Saharan Africa, water and sanitation services
are still severely lacking. As a result, a high
number of people suffer from preventable illnesses
and die every year. Population growth will further
increase these challenges in future. Improving
global access to clean drinking water and safe
sanitation is therefore one of the most effective
means to enhance living conditions in order to break
the cycle of poverty, enhance public health and save
lives in these urban slums.
Flash floods caused by heavy precipitation events in
small areas pose a great threat for especially the
urban poor, living in informal settlements like
slums. In these areas of high risk, there is no or
only inefficient resilience against a variety of
hazards. The lack of infrastructure specifically in
the water sector leads to an inability to deal with
storm water. The main form of waste and sewage
disposal is an open sewage channel running through
the slum areas. The deposition of waste in the
surrounding living quarters and areas used for urban
and peri-urban agriculture by a flash flood
increases health risks.
The proposed Alumni Summer School “Water and
Sanitation for the Urban Poor - Natural hazards,
climate change, governance and human rights” offers
the chance for researchers to tackle the problems
related to the fast growing informal and degrading
formal urban settlements in an inter-disciplinary
team. The Kenyan capital city Nairobi is taken as an
example since most work has been done and results
have been achieved in technical cooperation with
Kenyan institutions for sustainable improvement of
the water and sanitation sector.
Organization of the Summer School
Provided that the funds have been released by DAAD,
the Summer School will be held in Nairobi, Kenya
from 4th December (day of arrival) to 17th December
2011 (day of departure).
The Summer School will be organised by the Centre
for International Capacity Development, Universität
Siegen; Institute for Flood Management & River
Engineering, University of Kaiserslautern,
Biomechanical & Environmental Engineering Department
(BEED), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and
Technology; Department of Geography, Kenyatta
University; College of Agricultural and
Environmental Science, Makerere University. The
event is supported by GIZ.
Objectives of the Summer School
The main objectives of this Summer School are to
develop research based tools for addressing the
water and sanitation demands of the urban poor in
Kenya and subsequently formulate up scaling
strategies implementable by Multi-stakeholders
development organisations as well as the national
government.
Sub-objectives include:
1. To strengthen skills and
competencies of Alumni and other participants in
Natural Resource Management (NRM) and Flood Risk
Management, in the urban poor setting;
2. To initiate, nurture and
improve regional and international networks of
(North-South and South-South) experts working on
aspects of ”water for the urban poor”;
3. To give participants the
opportunity to gain hands-on experience in
research related to “water for the urban poor”,
“Storm Water Management” and “Climate Change”,
and develop concepts that benefit academicians,
practitioners and communities alike;
4. To create an opportunity for
Alumni and other participants to share
experiences with local communities on urban
water concepts and their management in Eastern
Africa;
5. To create an opportunity for
a regional exchange of knowledge and experience,
as almost all Eastern African countries are
involved in a water sector reform process
working on different levels and assisted by the
German Development Co-operation;
6. To catalyze innovations in
communicating research findings on natural
resources and conflict transformation in an
urban setting.
Topics of the Summer School
The tentative working groups will
cover following aspects:
1. Technical solutions: WSS
Engineering with a focus on low cost technology
appropriate for informal settlements, on site
solutions versus sanitary sewer systems
(Infrastructure water kiosks, sludge management,
EcoSan)
2. Governance: Governance with a
focus on institutional behaviour, private-public
ownerships/ partnerships, and the realisation of
human right to water (linkage of institutions of
water & sanitation data and health data);
3. Conflicting Uses: Conflicting
uses of water in urban centres and climate
change: adaptation strategies, green belts,
re-use of waste water/manure for urban gardening
(Water Quality)
4. Management Options:
Business/economics with a focus on tariff
setting, equity, utility management,
re-investment (Incentives for investments);
5. Risk Management: Storm water
management in urban informal settlements:
infrastructure and health (Information local
vis-à-vis state-of-art knowledge).
Both field survey and Participatory
Rural Appraisal techniques will be applied to
collect the necessary data in three selected “urban
poor centres” in Nairobi to achieve the objective of
the Summer School. A multi-disciplinary,
multi-cultural and multi-stakeholder team of
scientists and water and sanitation partners from
Germany and East Africa will collect this
information. German Alumni, Master students in
Integrated Watershed Management and relevant
stakeholders will be working together in working
groups, guided and supervised by experts. The
participants will be introduced to the problem at
hand and the objectives of the Summer School. In a
participatory manner the tentative programme and
data collection and analysis approaches will be
refined.
Participants
Provided that the funds have been
released, travel costs and accommodation as well as
an Excursion to Nairobi National Park are covered.
We invite for application:
- Senior master students with DAAD regional
stipends
- African Alumni of German Universities (PhD
students, young researchers)
- PhD students of the exceed programme (TU
Braunschweig)
- German PhD candidates (there might be -
hopefully - a possibility to finance shortterm
study visits for German applicants; however, the
final decisions are only available by DAAD at
early August)
Deadline for application was 31
August 2011
Please download the preliminary programme
here
German PhD
candidates who wish to apply submit the
documents required for DAAD PhD scholarships (< 6
months) to
ruger.winnegge@uni-siegen.de
The application sheets are available at:
http://www.daad.de/imperia/md/content/de/ausland/checkliste-doktoranden-kurz.pdf
https://scholarship.daad.de/obdvd/progbin/online/moveindaad/main/start.php?ckset=ok&_version=daad
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