Facilitating Processes of Change

For IRC, creating an enabling environment for sustainable water and sanitation interventions means helping to close the gap between policy and practice, and supporting innovative approaches to pertinent sector issues.

Promoting an Enabling Environment

Continuing to build on the knowledge and experience of sector actors, IRC joined hands with partners and stakeholders to assess sector problems, set priorities and test new approaches, and expand its number of joint learning projects.

Environmental health in Guinea Bissau

The 'Focusing on Environmental Health - Communication and Training for Water and Environmental Sanitation' (PROCOFAS) project in Guinea Bissau has been operating in the field for less than a year. Its ambitious goals are to make WES programming more effective through changing the way the water sector operates and the way extension services operate in all ministries.

That means less top-down planning and more listening, and responding to wishes and needs from the communities. It also involves improving hygiene by taking communication approaches which are appropriate for the various ethnic and socio-economic groups.

People involved in the project say it is changing the way people behave in water supply and sanitation programming in ESAs, the government, extension groups and the communities. The approach is a combination of listening, questioning, demonstrating and negotiating and is new for Guinea Bissau.

This year the project, funded by the UNICEF Netherlands Committee, focused on getting its system operating with three different ethnic groups, the Balanta communities in Oio, the Fula communities in Gabu and the Papel communities in Biombo. The local project team, which has no expatriate staff, is currently working in 15 villages totaling about 9000 people. By the end of 1998 field work will have increased to 50 villages representing 20,000 people.

In three missions to Guinea Bissau, IRC staff assisted the team with strategy development, staff training, and support to planning meetings with various partners in the steering committee.

In a recent mission the team noticed that demands for latrines among Balanta and Papel communities are gradually emerging. A small number of latrines have been constructed in the project areas with the communities, and all are being used. The latrines meet with very positive response, and as a result, latrine demand is growing. There have been over 200 applications for latrines, and many enthusiastic households have already dug pits. The emphasis in the programme is not on the number of latrines constructed, however, but rather on hygiene improvements using the latrine as a starting point.

The project staff have developed very good relations with the communities. This helped them to produce two videos on cholera and latrines in local languages. The villagers were the actors in the videos, a contributing factor to the enthusiasm expressed when they were screened. The films have also already appeared on national television twice. "We found a few households in the community who want to change - who want to improve and are respected by others. Usually there is someone in the household who has lived for some time in a city or even another country. This person has used latrines and has practiced other hygiene habits, but he/she lapses into old behaviours when back home because of strong social control. However, with the video and with discussions in the household, they become the first acceptors. Then other families want to follow."
staff member of PROCOFAS project

Urbanization, basic services and the health of people

As key actors in managing the urban environment and providing the basic services to safeguard the health of their citizens (water supply, solid waste collection, disposal of waste water) municipal authorities want interventions and investments to be planned right the first time around, and to recover the costs of reliable services that provide equitable coverage within the city.

With this in mind, users, planners and politicians must build up a common vision; prioritize areas where improvements will make the most difference; choose the kinds of services for which users are willing to pay; and make sure that existing services are operating efficiently and are effectively used. Such a process is more likely to be successful if low-income community groups can engage municipal authorities in a formal institutional setting to share information and voice their concerns, through, for example, advisory committees, community forums, or task-force groups.

Furthermore, if stakeholders share a common understanding of indicators that are used not only as targets but also as triggers for action and to gauge progress over time, chances for success are increased. The most useful indicators are those detailed enough to highlight the differences within a city relating to wealth, health, access to basic services and the quality of the living environment.

A research project involving IRC and ten partners from Europe and Africa brings together the findings of researchers and the savoir faire of field practitioners. Their work has focused on the use of a wide range of methods to collect and analyze data, methods to visualize results, as well as approaches to develop indicators with community groups and feed results back into the decision-making process at community level.

So far, two workshops were held in Mali in 1997 to prepare case studies, draft plans to organize stakeholder meetings in three cities, and design future project proposals. In 1998, a comparative study and a guide booklet for municipal authorities should be completed. The project is funded by the European Commission DGXXII.

A holistic approach to water treatment in Colombia

Since 1989, IRC has been working closely with CINARA, the Institute for Research and Development in Drinking Water, Basic Sanitation and the Conservation of Water Resources at the University of Valle in Cali, on a technology transfer project. The degree of flexibility granted by the Colombian and Netherlands governments allowed the project to surpass its initial objectives and attract large national, regional and local contributions. What thus began as a development and demonstration project to introduce multi-stage water filtration in eight regions, grew into a holistic joint learning approach to deal with a wide range of problems from construction to protection of water sources and efficient water use.

The joint learning approach sets academic and institutional knowledge, and the community's knowledge and experience side by side, and emphasizes creative capacity building among all involved. It also recognizes the importance of the interaction between technical, socio-economic and environmental aspects involved in a project. Technology transfer through joint learning projects will ultimately permit sector problems to be solved in a holistic way, by creating the opportunity for sector staff to develop their capacities and approaches that fit the local context.

The project experiences are documented in the new publication Technology Transfer in the Water Supply and Sanitation Sector: A learning experience from Colombia, in which three main themes emerging from the project are highlighted: an approach to searching for sustainable solutions; a model for technology sharing; and learning projects for capacity building at institutional and community level.

The government of Colombia has already started adopting learning projects as one of the mechanisms to improve the effectiveness of sector interventions, and the governments of Bolivia and Ecuador are considering the same. The positive feedback is stimulating CINARA and IRC to further develop this promising capacity building and technology transfer strategy, which can help to bring sustainable water supply and sanitation services within reach of a larger part of the population. It can also help to enhance the effectiveness of sector agencies and community-based organizations.