Innovative communication

Effective information exchange and two-way communication at all levels is essential for sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene.

Water, sanitation, and hygiene wikis search

23 Apr 10

This is a custom search engine that searches wikis on the web about water, sanitation and hygiene. It includes the Akvopedia, UN water wiki, a US water wiki, wikipedia. Wikis specific to water and sanitation are favoured over wikipedia in this search.

Making sense of water, sanitation and hygiene wikis

Watch a video, try a search engine and read about water, sanitation and hygiene wikis. There are several efforts ongoing with wikis. Juerg Staudenmann, UNDP, and Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson, Akvo.org, and Nick Dickinson, IRC, talk about water wikis and how we can avoid duplicate work and instead support each other.

Tools

Information and communication tools used by IRC and partrners.

Advocacy

IRC has provided global and local advocacy training and advisory work since the early 1990s. First as secretariat of the Information, Education and Communication working group of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council. Since 1995 IRC staff did increasing advocacy and communication advisory work at the request of agencies in China, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Uganda.

Innovative communications

Learning from innovation in communication has been key to IRC’s track record since the mid 1970s. We were actively involved with other NGOs in the first electronic conferences for practitioners in the water supply and sanitation sector in 1999 - 2000, as part of the OneWorld Water Think Tank series. We also learned from the first three-week Internet-based course in the water sector that IRC and The European Network University developed, tested and ran from 1999 - 2002, Dynamics in the water sector, on private sector involvement. The latest developments using innovative information and communication technology are the use of Skype for joint article writing, and adding audio MP3 files to our web site with interviews of participants in our 2006 symposium.

Impact of information sharing

IRC and partners are regularly asked good case materials to show the value and impact of information and knowledge sharing.

IRC Publications

IRC publishes various titles on information management and communication since the early 1980s in response to national and international initiatives. The majority of these publications is in English. Some are also available in French, Spanish and Portuguese.