About Source

What you get
Users
The staff involved
Partners
Columnists

What you get

The Source Water and Sanitation News Service is run in three languages (English, French and Spanish) by the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre in collaboration with local partners.

The English version comprises:

• The electronic Source newsletter is published 16 times per year by e-mail and online, including 12 regular issues and 4 special feature issues
• Source Bulletin on paper which comes out four times per year.
• WASH news blogs on themes, regions and resources

Source newsletter is sent free of charge to subscribers by e-mail, as an RSS feed and on Twitter.

Starting in 2008, public news feeds are available in the form of .

From 2007-2009, a regional version for South Asia was published co-sponsored by UNICEF.

In 2005-2006, the Japan International Corporation of Welfare Services (JICWELS ) distributed a translated version of Source Weekly in Japanese.

Users and feedback

More than 40,000 policy makers, sector professionals and information specialists use Source as their primary tool to inform themselves on water and sanitation issues and access related sites on the Internet.

In February 2010 there were 7,406 e-mail subscribers to Source newsletter, 2445 subscribers to the WASH news blogs and 83 followers on Twitter. A user survey carried out at the end of 1999, established that two-thirds of readers pass on their copy to others and that readership is 6 per issue. In 2008, the English Source Web page registered 222,039 page views, out of a total of 458,116 page views for the three languages combined. WASH news blogs registered 295,829 page views in 2009.

Read feedback from readers here.

The staff involved

Source Newsletter

Source Newsletter (English) is produced by the IRC Information and Communication (INCO) Section. It includes short news items, forthcoming events and courses, project updates, new publications and web sites, vacancies, funding opportunities, technology updates and lessons learned related to water and sanitation in developing countries. Each item includes, where possible, an e-mail contact address and the web address of the news source.

Three information specialists compile Source from information found by monitoring over 100 websites, news servers, e-mail discussion lists and press releases, and from readers' contributions and feedback.

Editor: Cor Dietvorst

Source Bulletin/Features

Every three months there is a special edition of Source Newsletter Features dedicated to more in-depth feature articles. To serve readers without e-mail access this is also published as Source Bulletin on paper with 5,500 copies distributed.

Editor: Dick de Jong

Partners

The Gender and Water Alliance (GWA) is a content contributor. In 2008, the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), an original partner of IRC in this publication, joined as content contributor and co-sponsor.

The UNICEF ROSA co-funded Source South Asia in 2007-2009.

Local partners are involved in the production of the various language editions of Source:

• Centre Régional pour l'Eau Potable et l'Assainissement à faible coût (CREPA), Burkina Faso and h2o.net (France) for the French version
• Cinara, the Instituto de Investigación y Desarrollo en Agua Potable, Saneamiento Básico y Conservación del Recurso Hídrico (Colombia) for the Spanish version.

Columnists

In 2010, Source started a new section, Opinion, with contributions from regular and guest columnists. The following people agreed to write a regular column, either once a month or once every three months: Mike Muller, Teun Bastemeijer, Duncan Mara and S. Vishwanath.