Practical Action Consulting Limited

In Bangladesh improved sanitation consists largely of latrines and septic tanks. Human waste from these facilities is dumped untreated in waterways or down drains, causing alarming health risks to all. In the Faridpur district of Dhaka, Practical Action is working with the government, pit emptiers the private sector, local development partners and other organisations to install a faecal sludge management system.

Short statement of Practical Action's commitment to delivering energy access made at the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) Forum in New York, April 2015

Briefing paper summarising key findings and recommendations from the Poor People's Energy Outlook (PPEO) 2017 report. In this edition of the PPEO, which builds on analysis and recommendations from the 2016 edition, we use bottom-up, integrated energy planning tools to model the national technology mix and financing required to achieve Total Energy Access in Kenya, Bangladesh and Togo.

Among the small number of mini-grids currently operational in Rwanda, in early 2016 none were known to make use of smart monitoring, control and payment technologies. Through its contribution to the ESCoBox research project, Practical Action Consulting (PAC) initiated a pilot test of an automated monitoring and control system on a small-scale mini-grid in Rwanda. This report presents some early findings from the first months of the system’s operation and recommendations based on the challenges faced during installation and early operation.

This market assessment gives an overview of the state of the electricity sector in Zimbabwe, and describes the country’s renewable energy potential and the degree to which it has been exploited. Assessments of the decentralised generation and mini-grid sectors follow, alongside an exploration of the monitoring and billing solutions which are currently applied in Zimbabwe as part of on- and off-grid systems.

As part of the Zurich Alliance, Practical Action is working to increase the resilience of communities to floods in Nepal, Bangladesh and Peru These three case studies cover:
1. Farmer field schools - how simple technologies are reducing community vulnerability by providing food security and income generation; 2. Empowering communities - how Practical Action is building capacity at local level to ensure community engagement in development.; 3. School brigades - building the capacity of young people to take positive action in the face of disasters

This report explores how non-governmental organisations can responsibly engage with social capital to reduce disaster risk in societies that are vulnerable to natural hazards. Social capital is a complex and nuanced concept and DRR programmes seeking to engage with social capital should do so in a manner that empowers and enriches preexisting social infrastructure while proactively incorporating marginalised groups and prioritising ongoing analysis of the socio-political context.

While previous research on social capital and disaster risk management has tended to focus on urban and rural settings separately, this study uses a case study approach to compare how social capital shapes disaster response in peri-urban and rural settings, frequently affected by flooding. Social capital refers to social ties, norms, and networks that facilitate group or individual access to resources. Social capital has a collective dimension, and its benefits are generally shared by members of a community.

Through an analysis of EWS policies at the national, district and local levels in the UK, Peru, and Nepal, the report identifies common and distinct challenges to meeting the needs of the most vulnerable in 'œtechnology-rich'€ and '€œtechnology-poor'€ countries. The analysis offers an assessment of different approaches to understanding disaster risk and the extent to which these approaches inform, and rely upon, different approaches to forecasting and risk communication.

This poster looks at aspects of a project set up by Practical Action in Bangladesh which aimed to enhance early warning systems for flooding.

Given the increased attention on resilience strengthening in international humanitarian and development work, there is a growing need to invest in its measurement and the overall accountability of “resilience strengthening” initiatives. The purpose of this article is to present our framework and tool for measuring community-level resilience to flooding and generating empirical evidence and to share our experience in the application of the resilience concept. At the time of writing the tool is being tested in 75 communities across eight countries.

Tackling the second-generation sanitation challenge in South Asia. While globally rates of access to improved sanitation remain woefully low, Bangladesh stands out as a country that has made remarkable progress in eliminating the scourge of open defecation. However, across the country’s growing urban centres, this success has created a so-called ‘second-generation’ sanitation challenge of how to deal safely with the faecal sludge collected from pit latrines and septic tanks. This challenge is likely to be replicated in many other countries as access to sanitation improves.

There is enormous need for improving soil fertility, inorder to boost the agricultural productivity in Nepal. Therefore, it requires collaborative effort from all the actors; such as NGOs, farmers, entrepreneurs and government. Practical Action strives to bring these actors together to scale up the use of organic fertiliser in Nepal. Together, we hope to revive the fertility of soil and sustain the agricultural productivity to feed future generations.

A short documentary on soil conditions and options for scaling up access to organic fertilisers for improved productivity in Bangladesh.

The objective of this paper is to promote collaboration in policy and planning between business-oriented agriculturalists, conservation-oriented foresters, and climate change-oriented environmentalists. Agriculture, forestry, environment, and land-use policies should incentivize agroforestry over conventional coffee farming and other practices that lead to deforestation or degradation of agricultural land.

Climate change is happening now and its effects are felt most by the world’s poorest and most marginalised communities. Please share to keep climate change top of the global agenda.

Effective communication of climate change attribution information is critical to ensuring decision makers at all levels understand and are able to act upon such information. Presented here are the results from a 2017 study in Kenya and India, examining the most effective methods, phrases and tools for communicating climate change attribution information to high-level decision makers, the media, and the general public.

Climate change attribution analysis assesses the likelihood that a particular extreme weather event has been made more or less likely as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Communication of extreme event attribution information in the immediate aftermath of an extreme event provides a window of opportunity to inform, educate, and affect a change in attitude or behaviour in order to mitigate or prepare for climate change.

The challenge of waste management is too large to be tackled by either the Local Authorities, or the formal private sector, or the informal sector alone. Partnerships are needed, and we must make more use of decentralised, cost-effective solutions that can reach all the residents of a town: rich and poor.