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Welcome, bienvenue and bienvenido to Akvopedia! Welcome to Akvopedia, the open water and sanitation resource that anyone can edit. We strive to improve water and sanitation projects through knowledge exchange on smart and affordable technical solutions and effective approaches. Akvopedia now contains 2,211 articles primarily in English, including some in French and Spanish. Akvopedia is hosted and managed by Akvo Foundation. Water Portal The Water Portal contains information on water collection, pumping and transportation, storage, treatment, and use of water. Sanitation Portal The Sanitation Portal contains information on toilets, collection, transportation, treatment, use of products, hygiene, and training materials. Finance Portal The Finance Portal contains information on the costs needed to finance, how to finance these costs, and how to monitor finance. Sustainability Portal The Sustainability Portal contains information on numerous sustainability frameworks, tools, and methods, using the F.I.E.T.S approach. Decision & Assessment Tools - NEW! Decision & Assessment Tools contain several tools, assessments, or kits that aid in the implementation of water and sanitation projects in an easier way. What's happening now New Portal: Community Exchange - Rainwater Harvesting Ever wonder what other rainwater harvesting projects are like? The challenges they face, the advice people have. Now you can explore more in-depth about rainwater harvesting implementation through our new Community Exchange - Rainwater Harvesting, a discussion forum from RAIN and RWSN shared from their Drgoups site. Here you will find shared experiences and best practices on rainwater harvesting technology and management. Keep in mind, we encourage everyone to add to the conversation! Just select the "Discussion" tab in Akvopedia at the top of the topic page you want to add to, and type your comments. Some of these discussions will be minimally edited & added to the general conversation of a topic, if found to provide additional, useful information. Photos of actual projects, manuals people used and benefitted from, plus local connections to supplies, and more! Expect this portal to expand in the coming months as more conversations get added. More news Updated!! Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies, 2nd Edition: The entire Sanitation Portal is now updated with the most current information from the new compendium from Sandec/EAWAG. It contains several brand new topics such as Pre-treatment Technologies, Settler, and the Imhoff tank. Plus redefinitions for many sanitation products. Biomass is now included a lot as well. Plus some newer versions of treatment systems that mention biogas and blackwater more frequently than the 1st edition. 70 Sustainable Sanitation Documents from Pseau.org : We now have links in our Sustainability Portal, column 5 (Social Sustainability) for 70 new documents in both French and English. These colorfully illustrate a variety of handwashing and sanitation methods that include topics such as schools and gender. Great for teaching kids! All links go to the pseau.org site where you can search by topic, country, or target audience. NEW RWH TOOLS: Make a personalized GIS rainwater harvesting map - We have teamed up with RAIN to create three new rainwater harvesting (RWH) tools in Akvopedia. One of these is called the Rainwater Harvesting GIS Map. You can follow three steps to create a RWH map to see optimal places of rainwater collection in your area. The other tools, Rain is Gain Tool and WASH Environmental Sustainability Assessment, help you to both assess your water needs/supply and make sure your WASH project is environmentally sustainable, respectively. Translated pages We are proud to announce our new Akvopedia Translations program! We have started our language program with translators for French, Spanish, 3 Indian languages (Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil), Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, with many more to come. See the upper right of our English page for the different language flags. New Translation: Our Rainwater Harvesting page has 6 new languages! New Translation: Our Business Development - Micro-financing page is now in Spanish, French, Malayalam, and Korean. New Translation: Our 3R (Recharge, Retention & Reuse) page is now in Spanish and Malayalam with more coming soon. Contributing to Akvopedia Share your news and knowledge on water and sanitation by contributing articles to the Akvopedia. We've used the same conventions as the well-known online resource Wikipedia, so adding and editing articles is quick and easy to learn. This graphical guide will get you started; more detailed information about editing wiki articles is available in the help pages: Help:Contents Editorial support Do you have quality content that you would like to contribute to Akvopedia, but lack the time or resources to upload it? Akvopedia offers free limited editorial services and always appreciates suggestions and links to expand our WASH wiki. Please contact our editor Winona Azure at winonaakvo.org. Thank you for visiting!