Applying Evaluative Thinking to a Community-Engaged Safe Drinking Water Project in Peri-Urban Guatemala

A large number of safe drinking water programs fail to create long-lasting solutions because safe drinking water problems are complex and necessitate multiple kinds of expertise at several levels of influence over often long periods of time to succeed. Such work is especially challenging in a service-learning context. Process-oriented ways of working such as evaluative thinking and community engagement may be useful ways to frame iterative phases of work on drinking water projects. Here we describe our use of both in an interdisciplinary university student project to develop and implement collaborative plans for a safe drinking water intervention in peri-urban Guatemala, complications related to its implementation, and measures and sources of data for evaluating health, energy, and cost outcomes over time. We also assess our successes and failures to date. Though full implementation of the intervention has not been achieved and work is ongoing, we provide this report as an outline which other groups pursuing public health engineering projects may find useful.