Resources Produced
Designing a Drinking Water Quality Monitoring Programme
This guide provides direction for PICs to identify, prioritise and analyse water quality parameters that are of greatest risk to human health to ensure that viable and useful information on the status of drinking water quality is achieved within the existing resources (budget, staff and laboratory capacity).
Keeping your Drinking Water Safe: A Community Toolkit
A low-cost alternative test for bacteria to reveal possible faecal contamination in drinking water which is simple and easy to interpret is the hydrogen sulfide (H2S) paper-strip test or the PathoScreen test. The test is well suited for monitoring drinking water systems in rural communities and outer islands where regular laboratory-based water quality testing is not possible. The WQM programme implementing partner WHO is building the capacity of local NGOs and communities through promoting the use of this simple H2S test and complementary sanitary survey inspections.
Best Practices Guide for Water Laboratories
The principal function of a water testing laboratory is to produce high quality data that are accurate, reliable and adequate for the intended purpose. Important decisions are made on data that are produced by laboratories. This guide explains best practices that can be employed by water testing laboratories to produce high quality data, even in the absence of accreditation or certification.
Water Quality Database
The electronic water quality database developed under WQM is intended to assist participating laboratories improve their data management. The database is user-friendly, provides useful tool for data interpretation to prompt appropriate follow up action, allows easy electronic storage and retrieval of data, graphs data to show trends in time to detect problem areas, allows data comparison to national standards or international guidelines and provides a tool to promote data sharing between agencies. Further support through training of participating laboratories in the use of the database will be provided to improve their data management capacity.
