Jean de la Harpe

Jean de la Harpe is another South African who joined IRC as Senior Programme Officer on local governance around WASH services, IRC’s new focus area. She is also leading IRC’s work with partners in Southern Africa in 2007-2011.

Jean received her Masters of Management, (Public and Development Management) with distinction, University of Witwatersrand in 1998. She is an institutional and strategic planning specialist who has provided consulting services in terms of institutional, knowledge management, capacity building, and policy issues to various agencies and institutions over the past 16 years, and to the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) in particular, over the past nine years.

She has acted as an institutional and policy consultant to DWAF, as well as provided advisory services as a DFiD consultant to senior management concerning restructuring of the water resource management structure within the DWAF national and regional offices. She has worked intensively on water services local governance aspects since 1999 when she assisted the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry to define the role of municipalities as water services authorities. Over the years she has developed various tools to support water services authorities to assess their governance functions and performance to achieve WSA indicators and outputs. In 2005 and 2006 she was appointed to a team to develop a support strategy for the water services sector support which primarily focuses on how to strengthen the governance role of municipalities that are water services authorities and to put forward solutions to address water services provision problems within local government and other water services providers.

She has extensive experience working in the public and development sector where she has worked with national, provincial and local government, on institutional and policy issues, as well as worked with civil society organisations, such as NGOs, NGO networks, CBOs and small rural structures.