Catarina Fonseca is trained as an economist and has a doctoral degree in water sciences. She has over twenty-three years of experience in development cooperation and non-profits of which twenty in the water and sanitation sector. She has pioneered sector development on the understanding of life-cycle costs and financing. She was the WASHCost Director (2008-2013), a large-scale initiative to identify the long-term costs of sustaining rural and peri-urban water and sanitation services. She has been part of the IRC management team and managed the International and Innovation programme from 2012-2019.
Catarina Fonseca was the Director of Watershed, a 5-year strategic programme that run from 2016-2020 to strengthen the ability of citizens to hold governments and service providers accountable for the services they deliver. She is an Associate of IRC and is available for consultancy assignments. Over the past 20 years she has trained, assessed, evaluated and provided technical support to over 50 clients. Since 2019 she has her own company, Pulsing Tide.
This study presents the first adaptation of the life-cycle costs approach to school WASH interventions. It is based on a survey of the sanitation and... Read more...
The world will not reach the sanitation Millennium Development Goal. There are still 1 in 3 people worldwide without access to safe sanitation. Within 15 years we want universal sanitation coverage and we know that we need to do something drastically different to reach scale and to reach the... Read more...
BRAC WASH has had a transformative effect on latrine construction in Bagherpara, Bangladesh – especially for the ultra-poor who cannot afford to... Read more...
This report, commissioned by UNHCR, presents a methodology to cost water services in post-emergency situations as well as in first emergency... Read more...
This book provides readers with a glimpse into the realities of managing large-scale initiatives with ambitious goals. It reveals that through... Read more...
In Ouagadougou, the WASHCost team found an example of how the water sector could be organized, by looking at existing initiatives using the life-cycle cost approach. Read more...
This paper concludes that there is chronic underfunding of rural water services, to meet the costs required to provide and sustain a basic level of... Read more...
Briefing note describing the life-cycle costs approach and why it was developed. Read more...