01May 2022 by Esther Shaylor No Comments
New Beginnings – The Origin of the Otter Coven

New Beginnings – The Origin of the Otter Coven

Water, Women
In 2017 I (Esther) travelled from the UK to India for an important work event: I was going to talk shit for five days at the FSM4 Conference. It was a gathering of WASHies (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene enthusiasts) like no other; I caught up with old friends and past colleagues, and met some new people. Little did I know then that two of those people would go on to be my co-founders of the Otter Coven. Our favourite emoji pin badge attending the FSM4 conference in Chennai, India I met Becky Sindall and Dani Barrington at the conference, and we instantly hit it off discussing conference classics like the long walk to the toilets and the tasty food at the breaks. We also chatted about the interesting work happening…
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14Nov 2018 by Becky No Comments
#WEDC41 Part 5: Be the change you want to see

#WEDC41 Part 5: Be the change you want to see

Water, Women
In July, I spent two weeks in Kenya at the WEDC conference in Nakuru and visiting sanitation companies, Sanergy and Sanivation, and the newly-established sanitation research group at Meru University of Science and Technology. This is the last in a five-part series of blogs about that conference and those visits. You can see the earlier posts about (the lack of) government support for container-based sanitation businesses here, about WASH failures here, about behaviour change toolkits here, and about systems mapping and the role of religion here. Sometimes you meet a person who you know is going to make big changes to the world around them. Joy Riungu, the Dean of Engineering and Architecture at Meru University of Science and Technology (MUST) is one of those people. Meru, like any other…
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30Nov 2017 by Becky 6 Comments

#WDP36 – More than a popularity contest…

Water, Women
In 2015, the first Women in Global Health list was published. It was a list of 100 leading women working in global health, and it has since grown to include more notable women in the field. It was started by Ilona Kickbusch, Director of the Global Health Programme at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She was bored of attending conferences and panels where she was the only woman speaker. She decided that she needed to showcase women in global health and asked her Twitter followers to nominate women to the list. The idea caught on and the list grew. At the World Conference on Drowning Prevention 2017 in Vancouver, Canada, a similar Twitter campaign was run using #WDP36 to find a list of 36 leading…
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18Mar 2016 by Becky No Comments

Development research: Access all areas?

World
Alexandra Elbakyan is in hiding, possibly in Russia. Elsevier, the publishing giant, have filed a legal case against her for sharing millions of academic journal papers on the internet. Her actions are a protest against the paywalls that so many scholarly articles are hidden behind. If you work in a research environment, these paywalls are all too common in your daily work. When looking for journal articles about international development sanitation earlier this week, I was dismayed to discover that the vast majority were locked away behind pay walls. Having working in research for a number of years, I am familiar with the frustration of finding what looks from the abstract like it might be exactly the paper you have been searching for, only to discover that to access the…
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