October 23, 2018
This story is part of our series on sustainable WASH finance. Susan Davis shares how blended finance can help us accelerate progress towards SDG6. By Susan Davis Despite the traffic challenges typical to UN General Assembly week, 15 people gathered in midtown New York for a Funder Collective for More Effective Partnerships event to discuss how blended…
September 20, 2018
This week’s story features blunders, bloobers and foul-ups in WASH programming. It was originally published on the Engineering For Change blog. To view the original article, click here. Shit happens. It is known that international development programs don’t always go as planned, and the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector is no exception. Our programs often don’t…
September 11, 2018
This week, a call to action and reflection from Susan Davis: How can we acquire a taste for old school, artisanal, and built-to-last development? By Susan Davis Housemade, artisanal, craft. Backyard beekeeping, urban chickens, knitting, homemade pickles. In recent years, it’s become hip to be square. Hipsters like bands that no-one has heard of (on vinyl),…
July 26, 2018
On June 7th, a rather rainy day at the Philanthropy House in Brussels, Belgium, Improve International convened a group of 14 people for the 3rd gathering of the Funder Collective for More Effective Partnerships. Over coffee, they met or got re-acquainted. Then representatives of three different types of funders – the Stone Family Foundation, Vitol Foundation, and Viva…
May 2, 2018
How much data and monitoring of water services is too much? How can we ensure data collection and monitoring efforts bring about improved results and don’t end up absorbing resources otherwise put to use to imrpove services? This week’s story explores these questions. It was originally published by Engineering for Change. To read the original…
November 9, 2017
This week we highlight lessons by UK Department for International Development (DFID), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, iDE and Thrive Networks in designing and implementing innovative results-based WASH programs. On September 20th in New York City, Improve International and IRC convened a conversation on innovations in grantee-donor relationships in WASH programs hosted by the Voss Foundation…
September 19, 2016
I got this email from Stuart, one of our board members, yesterday: “For June, R. and I used 2,000 gallons. That is 66.67 gallons a day. There is no way I could carry that amount of water each day to my home. Plus, what is it all used for? I guess shower and flushing are the biggest…
August 3, 2016
Fecal Plume from Lavender Hill. Photo Credit: The Emory CGSW team There is a place called Lavender Hill in Accra, Ghana, where trucks dump 250,000 gallons of untreated sewage onto a beach and into the ocean every day. I was recently in Ghana to attend the annual conference of Loughborough University’s Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC),…
May 23, 2016
During a recent desk review, we found there is no one widely accepted definition of sanitation success, even for broadly used approaches like community-led total sanitation. Some consider long-term success to be the movement of households up the “sanitation ladder,” the idea of incremental progression between service levels of different quality. Success for sanitation marketing efforts can include…
April 29, 2013
Waiting for water in Rwanda. Credit: Susan M. Davis Last month I went to the Sustainable WASH Forum and Donor Dialogues in D.C. A theme of the conversations was roles and responsibilities, especially the roles of governments. One interesting debate was about who should be responsible for monitoring. Some said that governments should be solely responsible. There are some…
© 2019 All Rights Reserved. This site is made possible through support of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.
Privacy Policy
