“Water and sanitation improvement good for economic development”

Dick de Jong Editor of Source Bulletin retires at the end of 2011 after 30 years as a guiding hand behind IRC communication. One of the best known people in the field of WASH communication, he has seen a revolution in approaches and technologies.

In the run up to his retirement Dick de Jong was invited by Peter McIntyre to look back over some of the changes and highs of his career, so far.

Dick: When I started here in 1982 there were no computers. We were on typewriters. In those days there was a typing pool where ladies typed up the stuff that the content people wrote. Later there was a huge IBM 6 computer which was virtually man high and a very fat thing with flashing lights and a cool room. Then came a little Brother with thermal paper that had 32 characters that you could change in one go. I remember it very well because I once had to rewrite our annual report 20 times on it.

Peter: How did you communicate with people around the world?

Dick: In 1982 we would have used the phone. I don’t recall exactly when the first fax came in and replaced the telex. Fax was a great development. It was cheaper and quicker and easier. To contact someone in the field in Bangladesh, that was basically letter writing.

Peter: What were the main sources for your stories about what was happening in communities with respect to water and sanitation?

Dick: The material came out of reports which we would read and then write a short story. We had IRC travel reports (from staff who had been to work in countries). We had them then and we have them now and if they are written well they deliver material that can be used for newsletter items and things like that.

In 1983 we had the first personal computers and the interesting thing was that we had them at home before we had them in the office. We were part and parcel of the Ministry system and the Ministry offered civil servants what they called PC private programmes. IRC management decided to sign up to this arrangement. We paid half the price and IRC paid the rest. So I had a PC at home two years before we had them at IRC. It was rather limited with 260 K of RAM and a hard disk of 1 MB. It cost 3,500 guilders and I paid 1,800.

The key thing was that we started. That was good management by IRC, a way of staff having computers and with less training than if you introduced them in the office.

Peter: What was sector communication like in the early 1980s?

Dick: Interesting enough if you look at our database, there were more newsletters then on paper than there are now on email and Internet. UNICEF’s Water, Environment and Sanitation Section had Waterfront, a good one, the UNDP World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) had one and IRC had one.

There was quite a bit starting up in communications but what was a huge programme in those days was the collaborative international training network programme, a collaborative effort run by the UNDP-World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (now WSP). They talked to water departments in countries about their training needs. They produced the ITN training programme, something like 32 modules with slides and tapes and paper that was rolled out massively all over the world. IRC was asked to contribute to the documentation components. We did field missions to support water departments to help set up local documentation centres to manage the data and information coming out of water and sanitation services and how you could use it at for various levels.

Peter: Was there an attitude at that time that ‘experts’ would feed information down?

Dick: The better programmes already in the 1980s were built on knowledge attitude practice surveys with communities. At the start it was a too much one-way communication. In the early 1990s the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council started an information education and communication (IEC) working group. We were asked to go out to interested countries to help local government set up IEC programmes as a two way process in water and sanitation programmes. In Guinea Bissau, for example, they linked up with community participation programmes. That was a community development programme where information education and communication played a major role.

Peter: We have seen this technological revolution through computers, the Internet, mobile phones, high quality cameras, video available to everyone. Has it brought a real change in communication?

Dick: It has brought a revolution in communication techniques, but the question is did it contribute to better communication and better listening to what is communicated? The technology seems to trigger so much excitement from people that they do not take into account enough why you use the technology and what you want to achieve. So the content side is missing out in too many initiatives.

For example, I use Twitter but I use it very sparingly and I don’t look at tweets that do not have either a link to a picture or a URL where I can find real content. Then I think Twitter is a useful tool.

Peter: Looking back on your career, what are you proudest of being involved in?

Dick: One thing is that we are the only agency in the water sector that has been able to keep a newsletter running since 1970 and having readers that react to that. We have now scanned in all these early paper versions and they are all accessible on our website and I think we can be proud of that. We recently had a request from Cranfield University who wanted a baseline on what sanitation technology was available in Africa and were able to dig up an article about a VIP latrine in Zimbabwe from May 1983.

I was also able to contribute to IRC information knowledge sharing activities. We always had a functional library where visitors come to prepare themselves, and we interviewed those visitors and out of that we organised briefing programmes. That contributed to the first three week course in the water sector in 1985, management for sustainability in water, sanitation and hygiene.

We have added monitoring for effectiveness, hygiene promotion, five or six three week courses. Over a 15 year period we linked up with partners and all of these courses are now being run by partners. That is a great achievement. I went to three international conferences this year. At all of three them I met people who said I was at the international hygiene course at NETWAS or the monitoring for effectives then and then at such a time. These people remembered from 15 years earlier the course, and they say they are still using the books! We have been able to set up a monitoring system where we are able to score the spread using the impact of the information, knowledge sharing of the advocacy work that we do.

Peter: There is a lot of competition for our attention from communication media. What is the communication challenge for IRC now?

Dick: It is finding a balance between what we deliver and country base communities of practice that emerges. On our blogs we have communities of practice which develop without us steering them. They have an internal discussion for example about sanitary napkin factories in India with people from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan taking part. Out of things that happen because users want to communicate, we have to generate relevant feedback loops to share at the decision-making level at country level and globally.  It is finding a balance between community driven communication and organisational communication, where on a number of key topics everybody should at least be aware of what is happening.

We have to combine international newsletter stuff with making sure that voices from communities are heard at country level. In the past we had development demonstration programmes and we brought community voices from those programmes to the district level and to the national level. It has to be like that so that whatever we do on advocacy is evidence based.

Another thing IRC can be proud about is we introduced My Source and My Library idea so that users decide which content they want from us. IRC has always had a position of being ahead of the pack a little bit and being a reputable independent organisation. Organisations in the world look to us for that.

Peter: Do you have any personal favourite stories from the field that made you think differently about something?

Dick: When I was on sabbatical leave in South Africa, I was asked to help the Mvula Trust to write up a few short case studies on how the work they supported contributed to economic development in water and sanitation. I visited ten places with Jabu Masondo, who had worked at IRC as part of the junior professional officer (JPO) programme, to interview and observe the programmes. We could hear people talk, a group of women who told how they fought for sanitation here and groups that were starting to make money out of looking after sanitation. Those materials we produced were used by Mvula to push for a greater focus on the message that the most important result from water and sanitation improvement is poverty reduction and economic development.

Although he is retiring, Dick intends to continue to do work in the sector and hopes to continue to visit the countries where he has worked in the past.

Peter McIntyre