In 1992, the United Nations Conference on the Envi-Ε½ . ronment and Development UNCED proposed a blueprint for a sustainable future: AGENDA 21. In this document, the world community tried to articulate the relationships which exist between health, development, poverty and environmental degradation. One basic human need affected by environmental degradation is water. The literature is rich in statistics about the effect of unsafe water on people: a case in point, every 8 s a child dies from a water-related disease. These statistics are mostly based on the impact of fecal contamination of drinking water and the infectious diseases which ensue. This is clearly a persistent problem, notwithstanding major international attempts to solve it. Extensive efforts such as the United Nations International Decade for Water and Sanitation did much to help us understand the underpinnings of the problem, and led to the development of an important compendium of technologies to address the issue.
Clearly, technologies are useful and sustainable only if they are appropriate in the context of their implementation. This mostly happens when there is a buy-in from the communities who would benefit from them. And this in turn, is mostly facilitated if those communities have had a hand in either developing andror testing such technologies in their own context. This was one of the major lessons learned from the International Water Decade. It was also the guiding philosophy for the International Development Research Ε½ . Centre's IDRC program for community-based water quality testing during the 1980s and 1990s. Third World