Opinions and voices for change
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My name is Deirdre Casella. I am a Programme Officer and have worked in various capacities at IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre since December 1999. My current focus is coordinating the monitoring and learning work of the Triple-S project. In Triple-S we aim to ‘proceed with good intent... Read more...
This week the Joint Monitoring Program of the United Nations announced that the MDG for water supply has been reached, most likely already somewhere in 2010. 5 years ahead of the deadline the percentage of the World’s population without access to safe water supplies has been halved. This is no mean... Read more...
Three years of creating change in Triple-S. Not a nice linear process but trying things out, getting better at it and finding words to describe what we do. And so it is time to step back and put it on paper. What is it this theory of change of Triple-S? Is it a theory or isn't it? Read more...
J’ai eu des minutes d’hésitation avant de prendre et aujourd’hui de publier cette photo malgré l’autorisation de filmer. Après un adulte qui venait à peine de déféquer aux abords du fleuve Mensurado, une jeune enfant à l’innocence certaine vint également accomplir la même besogne. Read more...
Quelques années après la guerre civile, les conséquences d’un assainissement médiocre et du manque d’eau sont nombreuses sur la santé de tous et en particulier des femmes et des enfants. 11/20 c’est la note attribuée au Liberia par l’ Unicef et WaterAid en 2011 en matière d’assainissement. Au delà... Read more...
Managing and sustaining change in a complex and unpredictable environment requires very different approaches and tools to those required to produce deliverables that can be well-defined in advance. Read more...
Top item on an overloaded agenda at the moment is the upcoming mid-term assessment of our Triple-S (link) project. As we prepare a terms of reference for the exercise we’ve been engaging with a number of external thinkers to help us create something that can meet the dual objectives of judging... Read more...
A summary of some recent discussions within IRC about self supply as an approach to rural water supply, based around 8 arguments. Read more...
Change at sector level, requires change by constellations of individuals and institutions. Learning alliances are an approach to change that brings together representatives from government, civil society, research institutions and the private sector to do joint research, find solutions and take... Read more...
For aid-dependent sectors like the WASH sector, aid effectiveness poses great opportunities to ensure more effective use of all available resources in the sector towards universal and sustainable WASH services. Read more...
Over the last year and a half we have been doing a lot of work with various international donors and other development partners like NGOs who support investments in rural water in developing countries. Read more...
The Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector is facing serious challenges: 2 billion people are without sanitation and 800 million lack water services. And when services are provided, most are unreliable, of poor quality and prone to failure. In South Asia alone, 570,000 children die every year... Read more...
Highlights from address by the Ethiopian State Minister H.E. Ato Kebede Gerba at the opening of the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) Forum on 29 November 2011 in Kampala, Rural Water Supply in the 21st Century: Myths of the Past, Visions for the Future. Read more...
The relationship between multiple use of water and sustainability in service provision is still a thorny issue. Read more...
A question from the floor at a Rockefeller Foundation meeting raised some interesting thoughts about MUS vs MDGs. Read more...
For many decades development aid of western donors has been pretty well shielded from probing questions by the public opinion and politicians. Read more...
This mapping exercise has confirmed that, despite difficulties and statistical constraints, it is feasible to disaggregate the ODA to the water sector from European Union donors into the three component subsectors sanitation & hygiene, water supply and IWRM. And to map aid these flows... Read more...
It is the end/start of the year (depending on the moment at which you read this), so time to look at where one stands. The Joint Monitoring Programme of the United Nations has also done that for the state of the nations of the World with respect to drinking water supplies with this* publication... Read more...
I have argued at times for the need for post-construction support to rural water supply, and so have various publications from IRC and others over the past decade. However, there has been critique to this, stating that there is little evidence that shows that such help helps improving rural water... Read more...
Recently for a number of professional and personal reasons I decided to revisit an old intellectual ‘love’: Appreciative Inquiry ( AI) In the past I experimented with this method in developing a somewhat static knowledge center into a proactive learning and facilitation center, and I remember well... Read more...