Water and Sanitation "Live" Web Portal

This exhibition was organised to introduce a web-based platform designed to match potential funders with water and sanitation projects, and to enable the open sharing of related knowledge and reporting through freely available, interactive, wiki-type software tools. Akvo personnel strategically designed the exhibition to be a sort of "lounge" where participants in the World Water Forum - held as part of World Water Week - in Stockholm, Sweden (August 2008), could visit on their breaks from the main event proceedings. The exhibition area featured a variety of demonstrations (e.g., of burgeoning water and sanitation technologies) that may be perused in detail on the Akvo web portal. Thus, by educating people through posters and PowerPoint presentations - with personnel involved in and passionate about the use of internet tools to transform the pace of water and sanitation development, this exhibition was meant to complement the networking made possible on Akvo's portal.

Specifically, the room was set up with the vision that the visitors would enter the Akvo water and sanitation "live" web portal and from there follow the "links" to different projects in the real world. The area was built up with several stations/stands/sites where demonstrators presented the real sanitation-related devices and projects that one might have viewed on the Akvo website - for example, an EcoSan toilet. At every site there were also monitors, laptops, projectors, and TV-walls or TV-screens showing stories from the field, films, and interviews. The idea was that the congress participants could follow the links by lights on the floor. To escalate the feeling, once in a while all the lights at all the stations were turned off so that the voices of people talking in different languages about their sanitation situation could be heard without distraction. During such periods, the only area in the room kept lit-up was the Akvo Log-on central, where several computers and staff were available to explain the concept behind Akvo and to educate people how their knowledge - when shared through the portal - will translate directly into action. Within this area there was also an Akvo reporting wall. (To get a flavour of what this Akvo "lounge" was like, visit this collection of photos on Flickr.)

In addition, more formal presentations were offered. For instance, Ms. Tineke Huizinga-Heringa, Secretary of State (vice minister) of the Netherlands Ministry of Transport, Public Works, and Water Management opened Akvo's side event with a lecture for approximately 100 World Water Week delegates. A panel was held, which culminated in an announcement by one of the panelists that Akvo has developed a direct upload feature for images via short messaging system (SMS).

As a backdrop to many of these presentations, Akvo showcased several of the new posters as part of the set it commissioned, viewable here. This poster campaign, designed by the Dutch artist Vincent Wijers, is part of Akvo's effort to "brand" itself with "dazzling movie-themed posters" including Bollywood imagery and eye-catching slogans such as "The Woman Who Built Herself a Toilet". Rather than the "impersonal images of people in plight...pictures of poor people looking down a hole", this aspirational art is designed to engage global audiences - beyond members of the development community - in water and sanitation issues. (The posters also adorned the conference centre toilets). One Akvo official explains that the posters' "imagery has been strong, but there has been a light play on male / female role models, and it's all focused on India and the African continent. It's played on kitsch computer imagery, too, which has attracted interest...[One] open source guru...was kind enough to describe our imagery as 'iconoclastic'. It's an approach that has worked."

Water and Sanitation, Development Aid.

According to Akvo, "Progress requires broad cooperation through public and private partnerships, community involvement and public awareness. Akvo wishes to contribute to this emerging work, and at the meantime show an alternative way of mediate knowledge. Sanitation is a problem that people are often shy to discuss, with excreta and its disposal being unpopular subjects from the local to the international levels. The aim with the Akvo water and sanitation 'live' web portal is therefore to exemplify our and other organisations/co-partners tools, as well as the everyday life for the estimated 2.6 billion people world wide that live without proper sanitation. To show the bridge that already exists between these two so separate worlds, follow the laptop to the drain."