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Using monitoring and evaluation for learning and change
During IRC’s Monitoring Sustainable WASH Service Delivery Symposium, Cor Dietvorst asked eleven Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) specialists three questions: why is monitoring is important, how are you monitoring now and how do you see monitoring in the future. He blogged about it here The interviews provide an interesting range of experiences about what is happening in the […]
Flux d’info AEPHA | WASH info flow
Make data and information flow The last two weeks of April 2013 I went working closely with IRC colleagues on the ground. Also I worked with ‘les rapporteur groupes thématique’ from the water ministries. The overarching theme was ‘flux d’info AEPHA’. I went to Burkina Faso, Francophone West Africa. AEPHA = ‘Approvisionnement en Eau Potable, Hygiène […]
Using evidence to ignite, accelerate and amplify positive change
With the rapid rise of mobile phones and mobile phone-based monitoring, collecting data is easier and faster than ever. Still, collecting sound evidence isn’t cheap. And how will the ocean of data help improve water and sanitation services? There is a global movement around “evidence-based approaches” and pressures from taxpayers and financiers to ensure ‘value for money’ […]
Learning from sustainability monitoring
Last week we had another hectic, information-dense, but also inspiring IRCnergy week. The overarching theme was communication. I spoke to Andrès Gil, who is IRC’s day-to-day presence in Honduras. When I first met Andrès, he was one of the young professionals taking part in the Southern Youth Zone Programme. A Guatemalan, who quickly adapted to his […]
Fail, learn and adapt
It’s much more fun to talk about successes than disappointments. But, from personal experience, I know that the things that don’t work out as planned are often the most powerful catalysts of new insights and new behaviour. Failure from which we learn, holds the essence of future breakthroughs: “A man of genius makes no mistakes; his […]
Vida's story
Reblogged from water services that last: In this clip, Vida Duti tells her personal story and shares the reasons why she decided to work in development. As the end of 2012 approaches, I would like to share this video with you. Vida Duti, team leader of the ‘Triple S’ project in Ghana, tells her story about […]
Creating a ‘learning and adaptive’ sector
At present, systematic documentation and learning in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sectors often depends on external/ project related funding. Two challenges are: how to institutionalize learning as an integrated component of WASH sector management and how to link sector monitoring to reflection and adaptive management. There are two broad learning processes which can contribute to […]
Process Documentation resources and opportunities to learn
The challenge is that too often Process Documentation is limited to simple documentation (in all ways) of events. Process Documentation as a method has the potential to achieve much more than that. Indeed Process Documentation offers the potential to identify (in a social or participatory way) the factors that influence change over time; understand what […]
ICT for WASH and public service delivery
Reblogged from Wait… What?: This is a guest post from David Schaub-Jones who works with SeeSaw, a social venture that focuses on how technology can strengthen sanitation and water providers in developing countries. Follow SeeSaw on Twitter: @ontheseesaw. In June, two organisations focussed on using ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in the water and sanitation sector joined […]
Where silver bullets don’t work, learning and adaptive capacity make all the difference
Knowing what works, what doesn’t, for whom and in which contexts is crucial to improve WASH implementation. In his article on ‘capability traps’ Lant Pritchett (2010) states that development projects often result in failure because they import standard responses to predetermined problems and assume the capability to implement. In fact such standard responses or so-called ‘silver […]
