IRC in two Fifth World Water Forum press reports

During the Fifth World Water Forum in Istanbul, IRC was mentioned twice in press coverage on 19 March 2009:

• The presentation on our WASHCost programme, aimed at improving life-cycle service planning in water and sanitation systems featured in the IISD World Water Forum Bulletin on Thursday, 19 March 2009.
• Nick Dickinson was quoted in the Today’s Zaman newspaper from the IRC stand in the NGO’s Civil Society Village on the question of whether the forum audience is representing IRC's target audience.

Improving life-cycle service planning

In the session “A conversation with grantees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” Ben Lamoree and Catarina Fonseca, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, presented the WASHCost programme, aimed at improving life-cycle service planning in water and sanitation systems by focusing on long-term maintenance and sustainability in project design. The IISD is doing the official day-to-day reporting of all major UN events, see thair daily reports at http://www.iisd.ca/ymb/water/worldwater5/.

Louis Boorstin, Deputy Director of the Foundation’s WASH programme, listed impact, sustainability and scalability as its central goals. He stressed the Foundation’s interest in leadership and learning, and its emphasis on “bringing sustainable solutions to scale.” Presentations were made by four grantees.

[…]

Participants addressed, inter alia: the challenges of reaching low-income communities; the effects of cultural differences in project implementation; how to establish evaluation criteria for projects that are responsive to learning; the challenges of demand generation for water treatment and sanitation services; and how the grantees navigated the political landscapes in which their projects were set.

IISD, World Water Forum Bulletin, Volume 82 Number 18 - Thursday, 19 March 2009.

Today’s Zaman newspaper

The Today’s Zaman newspaper reported that the 5th World Water Forum, currently being held in Istanbul, "is not dealing with the real water-related problems facing the world, offering instead only an arena for corporations to make profit from one of the earth's most precious resources, officials from NGOs at the forum have said".

Today’s Zaman, 19 March 2009,