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.
Increasing repair and maintenance funds leads to higher borehole functionality and water access rates in the drought-prone regions of Turkana, Kenya... Read more...
Research found a strong relationship between variation in seasonal water access and reported emotional response. Water security improvement could be... Read more...
Successful pathways secured uptake by government and had flexible programming. Read more...
This paper presents the journeys that Agenda for Change members have gone through in progressively embracing systems strengthening approaches in... Read more...
Policy recommendations are given for five building blocks: institutional capacity, financing, asset management, water resources management, and... Read more...
The Multi-country synthesis report brings together the insights from the 13 Triple-S country studies to identify trends in rural water supply,... Read more...
Guidance and tools for designing, developing, planning, implementing and monitoring and evaluation of a market-based sanitation approach and related... Read more...
Recording of a webinar on lessons learned after nearly four years of intensive research on the use of collective action in WASH by the USAID-... Read more...
In Ethiopia, prioritising access to groundwater, supported by responsive and proactive operation and maintenance, increases rural water supply... Read more...
An approach is developed to assess WASH risks in marginal populations that are poorly understood and served through conventional approaches. Read more...
This paper gives a first insight into the results of the assessments of the WASH systems done in Ethiopia, Ghana and Uganda, using the traffic-light... Read more...
Perceived poor performance of hand pumped boreholes has been a persistent problem in Africa Read more...
A briefing note on the use of cellular and satellite connected sensors for near-time monitoring of rural water services in Ethiopia. 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 paper presents findings on water and sanitation service levels from 16 small and medium towns in four regions of Ethiopia. Read more...
Emerging lessons from the use of building blocks for sustainable un-sewered urban sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa. Read more...