Tag Archive | Monitoring
Sustaining rural water supply using the principles of collective Impact
Collective impact is the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a complex social problem. Samantha King describes in a blog post how IRC and its partners in Ghana are applying many of the principles of collective impact in the process and actions to address the water […]
Timor Leste – a service delivery state of mind
By Harold Lockwood – Last week I was in Timor Leste supporting some of the work of WaterAid Australia and its programme in Timor Leste. As this has evolved over the last several years, and with coverage levels increasing, WaterAid Timor-Leste (WATL) has recognised the pressing challenge of maintaining service levels in those communities who […]
Users perception of rural water services in Ghana: A case of satisfaction or dissatisfaction?
By: Tyhra Kumasi, Senior Research Officer, Triple-S Ghana Dora is a 33 year old teacher living in Agbedrafo in the Akatsi South District. She depends on the only handpump in the community for her daily domestic chores; however she laments the difficulties in getting access to fetch water. According to Dora “even though fetching is on a […]
Tracking change and sharpening indicators
By: Marieke Adank, IRC Now almost 2 year ago, I was involved in an assessment of the state of water service provision in 3 districts in Ghana. This assessment was done in order to test draft service delivery indicators developed by the Community Water and Sanitation Agency, in collaboration with IRC, under its Triple-S Project, […]
Public finance isn’t a dirty word – it’s essential to get services to the poor
By Patrick Moriarty – Three moments stood out for me in a busy week in Stockholm. The first was when WSUP’s Guy Norman said that Public Finance wasn’t a dirty word – a point that I couldn’t agree with more or more wholeheartedly – and that is often overlooked in the rush to identify market […]
A Swedish Smorgasbord of sustainability: compacts, checks and clauses
By Harold Lockwood – During the recent World Water Week in Stockholm, the Directorate General for International Cooperation (DGIS) of the Netherlands Foreign Ministry and IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre organised a joint side event in the Sheraton hotel in downtown Stockholm to present and discuss findings from two major reviews, one from the […]
Warning: danger zone ahead! Or not?
In one of his previous blogs, Patrick Moriarty posed the concept of a danger zone, referring to the coverage level, at which countries that succeeded in raising first time coverage by constructing new infrastructure (capital investment) fail to maintain the infrastructure (due to lack of capital maintenance) or to operate it adequately to provide a […]
The caretaker always SMSes twice
The costs of getting spare parts for handpumps can sometimes be higher than the costs of the spares themselves. Imagine a handpump where some of the nuts of bolts have worn out. These might cost a dollar at a spare part retail dealer; but the bus ticket to town might cost three dollars. That is […]
On strokes and leaks, or how to assess functionality and service levels of handpumps
By: Marieke Adank, programme officer at IRC The Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA) in Ghana is developing a framework for assessing and monitoring water services. In this, it will monitor the extent to which service levels are met, as well as the performance of water service providers and service authorities as per nationally set […]
USAID and Rotary International adopt innovative sustainability monitoring tool
By Harold Lockwood – This is great news and fantastic to see USAID adopting and promoting this approach which aims to really track and better understand the underlying causes of poor sustainability in the WASH sector. Sustaining WASH services is complex and dependent not only the hardware (the pumps, latrines and pipes), but also a […]
Still or sparkling? Lessons from a WASH holiday
I suspect that some of you, readers of this blog, are equal water nerds as I am, and that you also take your professional interest along on holiday. At least, I cannot resist visiting the odd water works or taking photographs of the local water and sanitation facilities during my holidays. This summer holiday I […]
At the start of true scale in monitoring
From testing monitoring service delivery indicators and tools in 3 pilot districts by the CWSA and Triple-S to applying monitoring at scale in 64 Ghanaian districts, one quarter of the country. That is what will happen in the framework of SMARTerWASH in the coming 3 years.
Error 503: Service not available
By: Andrés Gil, IRC, Honduras As I was doing my interview with the technician of the Municipal Environment Unit, I encountered already the first limitation: “Error 503: Service not available”; internet was so slow in this municipality that it was practically not available. And this while we were talking about the implementation of the new […]
Islands of success
Sagar is an island at the mouth of the river Ganges where it meets the Bay of Bengal. Every year in January, about half a million pilgrims visit the island to worship at the holy Ganges. The hundreds of mobile toilet units standing on the empty festival terrain during the rest of the year are […]
Subverting bad policy for the better
By Richard Ward, Aguaconsult The most recent Global Water Challenge (GWC) webinar hosted at http://www.sustainablewash.org gave another useful opportunity to highlight the findings of the Qualitative Document Analysis (QDA) policy and practice research that has been disseminating during this (slightly cold) first part of 2013. Adding to the ‘reality content’ of those findings were two […]
water services that last 
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