Triple-S and partners think outside the box to change WASH sector approach

The underlying message of thinking outside the proverbial box, and pushing for a new and improved approach to WASH sector management and service delivery was prevalent throughout Ton Schouten’s visit to the UK this past November 2010. Representing IRC’s Triple-S, he met with partner organisations such as Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor, Water for People, WaterAid, and Cognitive Edge. The purpose of the meeting was to brainstorm ways on how to work together and bring the ideas of “sustainability” and “service delivery” to life. There is mutual understanding that the sector needs to progress from simply providing basic WASH infrastructures and services to making it more about sustainability and the people using these services.

The primary goals of this collaborative effort to bring about change are: 1) to get better at what we do by being more responsive to consumers and more focused on sustainable services and 2)  to inspire the sector to adopt more sustainability-focused monitoring, programming and investment approaches. It is important to explore new ways of capturing consumer experience of service delivery, and to be able to respond adequately to the positive and negative effects. Embracing emerging technologies like Sensemaker- an application that offers methods for including the voices of beneficiaries and other constituents at every stage, can better aid the analysis of communication and responses between consumer and provider.

Currently, the WASH sector is paralleling shifts in other industries, such as Information Technologies, which desire to be more service and customer oriented. Though the WASH sector is quite different, we can still learn from mistakes and lessons learned in other sectors in order to reach the triple bottom line of providing better services to the people. The aim of Triple-S is to bring organisations and projects together in order to support the sustainability of services and promote critical mass.

“…innovation in this sector cannot truly happen unless there is an acceptance that we may not get it right the first time and that failure and evolution is integral to the progress. New methods are needed to ensure that projects meet and respond to genuine needs”- Ton Schouten, 2010.