Training and advisory services

The minister of rural development from India opened the workshop on sustainability of changes in hygiene behaviour, jointly organized by the SEU Foundation and the IRC in Kerala. He stressed the importance of this theme and indicated that the ministry has drawn up schemes to extend drinking water facilities to all uncovered areas by March 2004.

IRC staff are directly involved in knowledge sharing and promoting its use through training activities and advisory missions. Increasingly this is done in a support role to partners in the South. Activities in IRC itself focus much more on training of trainers (ToT). Training activities included one study tour involving high level Indian sector staff, a workshop on scaling up community management, a training course on IWRM, a ToT on Hygiene Education and Promotion in the Netherlands and seven short courses run by partners. In the Netherlands some 42 percent of participants were women and in the South 22 percent. IRC also contributed lectures to different organisations including IHE and Médecins san Frontières and supported MSc students at IHE in their work. The Centre supported several (3 to 10 days) in-country workshops on awareness raising on IWRM, school sanitation and scaling-up community management.

Training Courses of partners supported by IRC:
Community Management, Kenya; Environmental Sanitation in India, Gender mainstreaming, South Africa; Operation and Maintenance, Mozambique; Methodology for Participatory Assessment, Mozambique and Nepal; Hygiene Education and Promotion, Sri Lanka; Cost Recovery, Burkina Faso and Monitoring in Nicaragua.

IRC expertise was used in 24 advisory missions during the year, involving 20 different staff members. The biggest client during the year was DFID, followed by DANIDA and The World Bank. A total of nine different external support agencies used IRCs advisory services. The missions undertaken to 15 countries showed a similar trend to last year with a shift in focus in their key themes from water supply to policy and institutional development issues (10), sanitation and hygiene (6), participatory methodologies (5) and gender issues (4).

Countries where IRC staff has supported activities in 2002:
Bangladesh, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Nepal, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Philippines, Samoa, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uganda, Vietnam, Yemen and Zambia.

Participation of the IRC and WEDC team in the process of sector reform in India may well be the most challenging advisory task of the year 2002. The Government of India, its Ministry of Rural Development and the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission, committed themselves to reforming the rural water supply and sanitation sector. Together with UNICEF they invited IRC to assist in this sector reform that seeks to put in place a decentralized framework throughout India to ensure sustainable, safe drinking water supply and effectively used sanitation facilities with relevant hygiene behaviours. IRC supported the development of the capacity building strategy for this extraordinary undertaking. The approach selected combines motivation, skills creation and actually applying these skills. The development process included: strategic planning by senior leaders, detailed scoping studies in selected districts and initial training and motivation of some 200 key trainers/capacity builders.

The World Bank contracted IRC to help develop an assessment of the AusAID-financed WSES project in Flores, Indonesia using the Method for Participatory Assessment and train staff from Indonesian NGOs to implement and use these assessments. Work included field visits to selected communities in Flores, generating information about the sustainability and use of the water supply and sanitation facilities

Minister of Rural Development Mr Shanta Kumar accompanied by Mr. Kumar Alok, Deputy Director (sanitation) visited IRC to discuss the HRD programme for decentralization of the water sector in India. They highlighted the importance of the sector reform process and praised the role of IRC and WEDC in the capacity building process that underpins the changes that are required.