Africa
Sustainability checks, clauses and compacts – USAID and DGIS lead the way
By Stef Smits Over the past year, there has been quite a bit of buzz in the WASH sector on the sustainability clause that DGIS seeks to include in its contacts with implementers. The pros and cons of this have been widely debated . A key component of the clauses is to have sustainability checks […]
A visit to Gammarth, Tunisia, or what I learnt at the African Development Bank’s retreat for rural water and sanitation
By Harold Lockwood Last week in Gammarth, Tunis the African Development Bank called a meeting, attended by about 160 sector experts and other government officials, to launch a new coordination mechanism for its flagship Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Initiative, or RWSSI. It was an interesting couple of days and through the various presentations, discussions, […]
Of squeaky wheels and grease – reflections of a social welfarist on the road
By Harold Lockwood Recently I have been on a continent-hopping tour through a different range of meetings and events, from which I have seen a pattern emerging, or at least a series of questions in my own mind, as I carry out my work in the WASH sector at an international level.
Vida’s story
In this clip, Vida Duti tells her personal story and shares the reasons why she decided to work in development.
Apples and oranges: a comparative assessment in WASH
A few weeks ago, an interesting email discussion was held on “water point mapping” D-Group of the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN). Part of the discussion focused on how much it costs to map or monitor all water systems in a country. Various figures were floating around in the discussion. But when looking at these […]
Uganda Sector Review 2012: are we still seeing the forest from the trees?
Reblogged from WASH in Uganda: This week 250 practitioners and policy makers from the Uganda Water and Environment sector met for 3 days during the annual Joint Sector Review Meeting. In my previous blog I focused on the challenge of stagnation in rural water: for the past years we haven’t seen any increase in coverage […]
“A bit more for some” may not be a bad idea
Two weeks ago, the “management and support” working group of the RWSN had its first meeting. This meeting focused specifically on management models and support arrangements for piped water supply in small towns. As rural settlements become bigger, a shift is made from point sources – like boreholes with handpumps – to piped systems. This […]
Piloting and scaling up
In this interview, Vida Duti explains how Triple-S Ghana works at all levels in order to move from piloting in the three districts, to scaling-up.
Stagnating coverage and functionality in rural water in Uganda: can this nut be cracked?
Next week more than 200 practitioners and policy makers from government, civil society, private sector and donors will come together for the annual Joint Water and Environment Sector Review in Uganda to review progress and set-backs during the past year and discuss and decide on priorities for the coming year. For rural water Uganda is […]
Don’t shoot the messenger, but embrace the sad stats
Driven amongst others by the mobile phone applications, more and more statistics are becoming available on the state of water services. These go well beyond the coverage data we were used to in the JMP reports (and which this year gave us some reason to be mildly optimistic). The new stats provide more insight into […]
Experimenting with water service delivery
By Patrick Moriarty Coming up with a convincing elevator pitch for our Sustainable Services at Scale (Triple-S) project has long been a challenge. Which, given the complexities of the rural water sector itself, is possibly not that surprising. Whether defining ourselves (at least in part) as a complexity informed water services development lab will help, […]
Multiple-use Water Conflicts
By: Seifu Kebede, Taye Alemayehu, Asefa Kumsa and Frank van Steenbergen In the last five years, the development of small scale private irrigation has caught on in Ethiopia. Small, high-value horticultural plots are ‘popping’ up in many parts of the country. Often the new vegetable gardens use water from rural drinking water systems, converting these […]
Community-based management is dead; long live community-based management
Last week, we had our first Triple-S research seminar, discussing the first findings from the assessments of service provision around point sources in Ghana and Uganda. Although I had seen a sneak preview of some of the data, the consolidated results were shocking. After seeing them, I was tempted to declare community-based management (particularly of […]
FLOWing data
By Patrick Moriarty – I mentioned some cool new outputs from IRC’s Ghana programme in my previous post. These factsheets present a rich picture of water services and their governance based on a total survey in our three Triple-S focus districts in Ghana. The fact sheets aren’t cool due to their content – which is actually […]
Allocation of funds for district level WASH programmes: What is the ideal formula?
By Lydia Mirembe and Deirdre Casella in Lira, Uganda - What started off as a commonplace lecture-like meeting in the Lira District Council Hall, ended up in a spirited discussion about a variety of issues around the delivery of water services in a decentralisation framework. Conditional grants for water and sanitation; mobile phones for water; […]
