Vision and mission

Vision: The South Asia regional IRC team together with partners supports improved, pro-poor and gender equitable local WASH governance at scale through learning processes and hands-on activities.

Mission: To catalyse, support and facilitate multi-stakeholder platforms built upon trust and stable, long term productive partnerships for innovation and impact at scale.

Strategy: The core strategy is support to multi-stakeholder platforms for learning and action. The South Asia partnerships will follow a pro-active, multi partner, multi-pronged approach to ensure impact at regional level. The South Asia regional IRC team and partners strategy is rooted on the pillars partnerships, focus, leverage & impact and flexibility.

Partnerships:

• Partnerships will be across civil society, government, knowledge institutions and international organisations.
• Guiding characteristics will be joint activities with two or more partners, track records, pro-poor and equity focus, transparency and integrity and capacity to absorb and adapt knowledge.
• The partnerships will actively promote and facilitate sharing and learning between partners in the region.

Focus:

• Core themes for the South Asia programme are ‘sanitation and hygiene’ and ‘water governance’, building upon expertise and experience around SSHE, QPA and community management.
• The two areas address paramount South Asia problems; the looming water crisis in large parts of the region and the poor access and use of improved WASH facilities.
• Given the geographical and population magnitudes within the South Asia region the programme will focus on India, Bangladesh, and Nepal to allow sufficient depth in learning processes. From there the programme aims at across-country level learning.
• Geographic focus will emerge over time driven by the presence of strong partners, demand, and opportunities.

Leverage & impact:

• Initiate small-scale action research projects with NGOs, academic institutions and specialised government organisations to develop and test new pro-poor WASH approaches.
• Scale-up proven quality WASH approaches by collaborating with government agencies, large-scale NGOs and external support agencies.
• Pro-actively stimulate and facilitate South-South learning around apt themes and issues.
• Share and apply lessons learned with strong partners who have the capacity to adapt and apply lessons learned to local circumstances.

Flexibility: Strategies encompass flexibility by continuously aiming at:

• Seeking added value to the ongoing developments and activities in the region.
• Balancing innovation and application at scale.
• Serving sector demands and challenging the South Asia development agenda.
• Dynamic partnerships and geographic focus targeting at results.