Nicolas Dickinson

Nicolas (Nick) Dickinson is an IRC associate and independent consultant at WASHNote. He brings his experiences in the WASH sector, capacity building and information and communication technology (ICT) as well as his affinity for people to his work with governments and business on achieving sustainable services.

He has worked across Africa with governments to strengthen pan-African, national and local monitoring and evaluation systems, including assessing these systems in multi-stakeholder processes. Most recently, he is currently working on Western and Central African programme to strengthen monitoring and evaluation of WASH services in nine countries across the region, provides advice on monitoring and evaluation in Ethiopia and has worked on the monitoring indicators and reporting system for the African N'gor Commitments on Sanitation.

Nick Dickinson also follows the latest developments in business models using ICT to innovate WASH and energy services and sits on Grant Panel of the GSMA Mobile for Development Utilities Innovation Fund (http://gsma.com/m4dutilities) and has facilitated numerous events which showcase these innovations such as the ICT Marketplace at the Rural Water Supply Network Forum. His interest in making data more useful for professionals and lowering the cost of using ICT has led to his work on international data standards such as the Water Point Data Exchange (www.waterpointdata.org). In addition, he worked on the life-cycle costing of water and sanitation services, including the development of tools and methods for governments and other professionals in the WASH sector.

Some projects he worked on in the last five years include SMARTerWASH (scaling up district monitoring in Ghana in 6 of 10 regions), KnowledgePoint (a cross-sector cross-organisation Q&A service), Sustainable Services at Scale, and WASHCost.

Before starting at IRC, he worked as a consultant on various projects including an evaluation of the Nile Basin Capacity Building Network of River Engineers (NBCBN-RE) and co-organising the 50th anniversary symposium in 2007 of UNESCO-IHE, Water for a Changing World: Enhancing Local Knowledge and Capacity Symposium. He started his own business in designing custom content management systems (CMS) to help small business manage their content online using simple intuitive interfaces and clean designs.

Nick has an MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management from Oxford University. He received a BSc in Chemistry/Biology and a BA in Political Geography from University College Utrecht, both Cum Laude.