Themes
IRC and partners have identified a number of areas where they believe the existing information is insufficient and that there is a need to generate new knowledge. This is done through collaborative work such as literature reviews, advocacy meetings, publications and information sharing workshops.
Financing and Cost Recovery
Few countries have realistic policies, operational strategies or plans for cost recovery and financing for sustainable water supply services, particularly for the poor. In fact most of the strategies for cost recovery are short sighted and address only part of the issue of sustainability, resulting in system degradation. Governments, development agencies and communities all over the world are struggling with this. This focus area needs to be addressed urgently.
Scaling Up
Community management has become the leading concept for implementing water supply systems in rural areas in developing countries. It has yielded significant achievements, but it has not succeeded to supply water on a large scale and to secure long term sustainability of water supply systems. For that, institutional support to community managed water systems is needed.
That is the core and main objective of scaling up: indefinite sustainability (scaling up in time) and 100% coverage (scaling up in space) of community managed water supply systems.
Gender and Equity
If water and sanitation projects and programmes are to be sustainable, equitable and effective, they must be gender-balanced and provide access for all.
Participatory Management
Building on its deep knowledge of participatory approaches, Participatory Management focuses on the development and use of various assessment methods for the effective and efficient planning of new services and for the monitoring of existing ones, at both community and district levels. In many cases this can be done in combination with computer management tools. Based on the success of the Methodology for Participatory Assessment (MPA), a new flexible system called Qualitative Information System (QIS) has been developed that enables quantification of people's perceptions of project progress and processes, while Action Monitoring for Effectiveness (aMe) can help to make short term improvements in project effectiveness at the lowest appropriate level.
