Everyone Forever: an achievable goal

Published on: 25/03/2014

Everyone Forever is an end state that's achieved when 100% of households, schools, clinics, and businesses receive a sustainable water and sanitation service. IRC, Water For People and WSUP are collaborating to achieve this goal – sharing lessons learned and seeking to align our current and future programming towards it.

Everyone Forever is achieved when:

• Everyone expects and receives a service
• Government champions and leads the effort to achieve results over time
• Financial flows support services on an ongoing basis
• Problems and challenges are identified and addressed promptly
• All water users collaborate, not compete, over water resources use
• INGOs or other external agencies are no longer needed to provide services to anyone.

Everyone Forever is an end state.  Together with Water for People, WSUP and other organisations such as the Millennium Water Alliance, we're looking at how to achieve that end state. There are no hard and fast rules, but we do share some ideas about what works. These include:

• Operating at a whole district and/or city scale to build a critical mass of influence, business interest, and finance flows, so that services can be sustained over time
• Acting as resource brokers and coaches to support and strengthen alignment and action by local and national governments and service providers
• Advocating for greater effectiveness in national and global decision-making – for example, linking measurement/monitoring with investment in services
• Behaving as a network, sharing ideas, resources and skills across organizations to maximize effectiveness and accelerate impact

To achieve success we believe that it is necessary to work at three levels:

• Locally, where our core function is that of an innovation lab, testing ideas and innovations in close partnership with districts and city governments
• Nationally, where we operate as a hub, convening, sharing new concepts and evidence of what works, drawing from global and local practice with public, private, and NGO stakeholders
• Globally, where we work to support, cultivate, and grow a collective action initiative to achieve Everyone Forever.

Measurement, monitoring, and investment planning are at the heart of our work, including accounting for the full life-cycle costs of a service.

To support achieving Everyone Forever, we are building enterprise tools and systems around monitoring, costing, and financing to share results and learning in real time. 

If you share our vision (however you word it), and recognise at least some of this way of working, we'd love to hear from you.