Learning alliances emerge in the water sector

The knowledge and experience gained by researchers, development agencies and others in the water and sanitation sector is enormous. NGOs, governmental bodies and external organisations claim to learn lessons from success and failure at country and community level.

Yet even today the concepts and processes that come out of country lessons are not replicated at a great scale or between countries. The same mistakes are made, the same lessons learned and unlearned. Even successful innovative approaches such as rope pumps, community gardens and technically efficient latrines struggle to go to scale.

Often the factors that made an innovative pilot scheme work cannot be replicated because they required an external NGO or special funding or an unusually motivated team at community level. So how can successful community level programmes be sustained and spread to the extent that they make a difference on a national or regional scale?

Increasingly the focus is on how critical actors at district or national level are involved with and learn from valid lessons from research. Do they share a framework for understanding problems and solutions? Do they see each other as allies, or as rivals?

Typical for our sector

This is a particular problem in our sector with many actors from different organisations, and where different government departments take the lead on different aspects of water policy and management.

A learning alliance can be the answer to these problems. A learning alliance is a group of representative stakeholders with a shared understanding of the problem to be solved. They aim to come to shared and commonly owned approach to dealing with the problem that leads to implementation, scaling up faster and wider and a sense of ownership.

Example

A good example of a learning alliance in which IRC is involved is the Euro-Med Participatory Water Resources Scenarios (EMPOWERS) multi-country research and development project that started in 2003, led by Care International UK. The EMPOWERS project http://www.irc.nl/empowers aims to improve long-term access to water by vulnerable populations in Egypt (where demand exceeds supply), Jordan (with the lowest per capita water levels in the world) and the West Bank and Gaza (where access to water is controlled by hostile authorities).

This three-year project has been designed as a learning alliance. There will be learning partnerships at country and district levels in the countries involved. The immediate aim is to improve flows of information between water authority staff at governate and district level and community beneficiaries of pilot projects. One aim is to increase the involvement of civil society and public awareness of problems and opportunities. Regional policy and technical forums will exchange experiences and regional working relationships develop joint training.

What are learning alliances?

A learning alliance is more like a process than a group of people. Research and development agencies share knowledge and learn together about what works and why. They then work together to build local capacity to use that knowledge in practice.

This not only helps to ensure that the right models are chosen to go to scale but breaks from the practice whereby an NGO carries out a pilot scheme, writes a report saying it has been a success, holds an implementation workshop and leaves.

Look for ‘engines of uptake’

A learning alliance also looks for ‘engines of uptake’ to promote initiatives that work, such as the small scale private sector craftspeople who made and promoted rope pumps in Nicaragua and treadle pumps in Bangladesh.

Learning alliances can be created at national or district level, or at both, with links between the two. National alliances might include policy makers, line ministries, research institutes, training organisations, finance organisations, donors, international NGOs and local government associations.

District alliances could include local government, local NGOs and CBOs, Water Users’ Associations, researchers, trainers and extension workers.

Learning alliances need clear objectives, usually related to applying research approaches to real world problems. They limit the number of individuals who attend formal meetings but include all key actors.

Learning alliances promote action research and document the process of change, capturing lessons through informal reports, video interviews, photos and diaries, journalistic style reports, which are quickly fed back to formal sessions. Lessons are learned together and become the basis for future action.

The aim is not so much to produce a report for a website or institution as to bring these lessons back into the learning process, to understand why things worked and how problems were overcome.

Please address reactions through the comments button to: Catarina Fonseca.

Keywords

• Governance