New IRC Business Plan approved

Strategy

IRC will continue its contribution to reaching the Millennium Development Goals for water supply, sanitation and hygiene. We will do this by strengthening our position and role as a unique information broker, innovator and capacity builder for the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector. By increasing the leverage of our programmes and activities we aim to raise their outcomes and impact.

To reach these goals, we will implement a strategy which has the following main components:

• A stronger focus in our core programmes and integration of our activities by adopting a country and regional focus to our programmatic and capacity-development work
• Reinforcing and strengthening our core competences by making a clear separation between our roles as a global information broker and as a development partner in a reduced number of carefully chosen countries and regions.
• The flexible application of different programmatic and organisational modalities for our different roles and the different countries or regions in which we work.
• Actively exploring the use of different types of partnerships at global, regional and national level to create maximum leverage and impact in the sector and for different target audiences.

By shaping the programmes as integrated activities and managing these as such, we will generate more synthesis of our core strengths and competences. The first half of 2007 will be the inception phase which be dedicated to finalising and fine-tuning the initial planning as set out in the new Business Plan.

Organisational challenges

The Business Plan is particularly important, coming as it does at a time of transition for the organisation, which now has a new legal structure and is moving towards greater financial autonomy from the Dutch government. As funding from DGIS (Dutch Directorate General of International Co-operation) and VROM (Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment) is set to reduce in future, so the Business Plan allows for the flexible and effective use of core funding over the next five years, in order to optimise leverage and to support new business acquisition. Securing new sources of external funding will continue to be the responsibility of the office of the Director, but importantly, the drive for new business acquisition will increasingly come from opportunities and contacts at regional and country levels. The long-term aim of IRC at the end of the Business Plan period is to secure approximately 50% of funding from non-core sources (i.e. other than Dutch governmental ministries).

The new Business Plan reflects changes in the governance structure of IRC and the new programmatic organisation with an emphasis on the two main programmes (Global and Regional). The plan provides for a period of transition between the existing way of working to a more integrated matrix, in which ‘teams’ will be drawn from the existing sections to work on programme-related projects and tasks. While the sectional structure will remain, a new management structure will be introduced in the inception period to delegate more responsibility to the senior staff that will manage the different programmes. The Management Team operations and regulations will also be adjusted to reflect these changes and to provide more transparency and accountability.