Stef Smits is a senior programme officer and Co-director of IRC's Growth Hub. He has 20 years of professional experience in water supply and sanitation in over 25 countries in Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, and South Asia. His main thematic expertise includes: institutional models for water supply, sustainability and enabling environment, monitoring, costing and financing of services and integrated water resources management.
Stef has led numerous projects on these topics, and published about them. In addition, he has ample management expertise: from consultancy assignments to multi-annual programmes, and units within an organisation. He has worked for a range of clients including bilateral donors, development banks, research funders and NGOs. Stef holds an MSc degree in Irrigation and Water Engineering from Wageningen University, The Netherlands.
An approach is developed to assess WASH risks in marginal populations that are poorly understood and served through conventional approaches. Read more...
A call for commitment, transformative thinking, engagement, integration and disaggregated data production. Read more...
Approximately one in four handpumps in sub-Saharan Africa are non-functional at any point in time, which in 2015 was roughly equivalent to 175,000... Read more...
This report presents a theoretical cost-to-serve by Safe Water Enterprises (SWEs) for the estimated 3.8 billion people without safely treated water. Read more...
Neither rural sustainability checks, nor urban benchmarking frameworks, are entirely suitable for monitoring small town water services. Read more...
Water-related emotional distress is predominantly associated with the 'cost of water' and the 'size of household'. Read more...
This case study highlights how an organisation can identify potential threats to institutional sustainability common in an extremely low resource... Read more...
Data drawn from the Water Point Data Exchange on 11 countries, reveals that an average of 78% of water points (including handpumps, piped supplies... Read more...
Based on 20 detailed successful case studies from across India, this book outlines future rural water supply approaches for all lower-income... Read more...
This paper presents findings on water and sanitation service levels from 16 small and medium towns in four regions of Ethiopia. Read more...
Top-down efforts are ineffective for connecting low-income urban populations to centralised water, sanitation or electricity services. Bottom up,... Read more...
The most effective approach to adaptation is to strengthen governance of the WASH sector, for example by adopting principles of adaptive management... Read more...