Overview - Thematic Overview Papers

Do you need to get up to speed quickly on current thinking about a critical issue in the field of water, sanitation and health?

Try an IRC TOP (Thematic Overview Paper). TOPs are a web-based initiative from IRC. They combine a concise digest of recent experiences, expert opinions and foreseeable trends with links to the most informative publications and websites. Each TOP will contain enough immediate information to give a grounding in the topic concerned, with direct access to more detailed coverage of your own special interests, plus contact details of resource centres or individuals who can give help.

Reviewed by recognised experts and updated regularly, the TOPs will provide water, sanitation and health professionals with a single source of the most up-to-date thinking and knowledge in the sector.

Getting started

• The PDF file is located at the bottom of the first page of the TOP and in the right-hand column of subsequent pages.
• On the first page of the TOP, you will find a summary at the bottom of the page. On subsequent pages, the sections of the summary are located in the right-hand column.

Contents of each TOP

• An Overview Paper with all the latest thinking
• Case studies of best practice
• TOP Resources:
  links to books, papers, articles;
  links to websites with additional information;
  links to contact details for resource centres, information networks or individual experts.

To help those who have little or no access to the Internet, the TOPs will be available in hard copy format too. IRC will produce printed copies at intervals, and the website will contain a .pdf version of the most up-to-date version, so that individuals can download and print the information to share with colleagues.

The TOPs are intended as dossiers to meet the needs of water, sanitation and health professionals in the South and the North, working for national and local government, NGOs, community-based organisations, resource centres, private sector firms, UN agencies and multilateral or bilateral support agencies.

Not all the information will be of interest to everybody. The strength of the TOPs is that you can scan the summary to find the parts that matter to you, and then download the full PDF file. So, if you want to be up-to-date on what is happening in this important sector, don't search around aimlessly; go straight to the TOP!