The water and sanitation sector is not short of new and emerging technologies, but hardly any have been adopted into national strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa, nor have they been widely taken up by private enterprise. The contribution of new technologies to MDG targets appears therefore to have been minimal in the last 20 years. A key constraint to reaching the sector targets therefore appears to be the lack of systems to assess the potential of a technology and lack of ability to take new appropriate technologies to scale effectively. WASHTech seeks to address the problem through research on an innovatory process for assessing the potential and sustainability of a wide range of new technologies, and for designing successful strategies for scaling up.The overall development objective is for more effective investment in new technologies to achieve MDG targets. The project (WASHTECH) objective is to strengthen sector capacity to make effective investment in new technologies, through development of a framework which assesses the potential of new technologies introduced into innovative de-centralised systems.The project objective would be achieved through research producing two levels of outputs. The first level of outputs will consist of a widely applicable Technology Assessment Framework (TAF) and process that will provide a simple system and criteria for evaluating new technologies and their performance, identifying sustainability issues, and analysing approaches to introduction, innovation, diffusion and scaling up, including establishing of the required capacities in the three countries,: Burkina Faso, Ghana and Uganda. The second level of outputs depends on the TAF development and capacity building. They define strategies for innovation and scaling up, and the time-span and process needed to achieve successful up-take and sustainability.These outputs are both of direct use to the sector and are also an indication of the value and application of the framework