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Environment & ClimateOpen
Create a Community Water Quality Monitoring Toolkit for Ibadan's Peripheral Wards
Design a low-cost, easy-to-use water quality monitoring toolkit that community health volunteers in Ibadan's outskirt wards can deploy themselves, without laboratory equipment or technical training.
The brief
In the wards on Ibadan's outer edges, including areas like Ona-Ara, Lagelu, and parts of Egbeda, many households rely on boreholes, hand-dug wells, or surface water sources. Water quality testing is technically available through government agencies, but the process is slow, expensive, and rarely reaches these communities in practice. By the time a family knows their water is contaminated, they have already been drinking it for months.
The gap is not the science. Basic water quality indicators, including turbidity, pH, nitrates, coliform bacteria, and iron levels, can be tested using low-cost field kits that cost under 5,000 naira per household annually. The gap is that community members do not know how to use them, interpret the results, or know what to do if a result is bad.
Your deliverable is a monitoring toolkit designed for a community health volunteer with no laboratory background. It should include: a one-page visual testing guide in English and Yoruba, a simple decision tree that tells a user what to do depending on the result (boil, filter, report, or escalate), a recommended kit list with current Nigerian market prices and suppliers, and a short facilitator guide (4 to 6 pages) for training a group of ten volunteers in a half-day session.
Test your guide by walking one person unfamiliar with water testing through it and noting where they get confused. The best submissions will show evidence of that kind of iteration. A toolkit that sits in a PDF and never gets used has failed its purpose.