Taking stock

By John Isherwood
 
Stepping down as a WaterAid trustee after 20 years gives me an excuse to attempt to take stock of what we have achieved, and where the future might take us.

First, I believe we can claim to have been an even greater success than our founders envisaged. I'm reasonably confident in writing this as I was lucky enough to be one of them! But it leads to the question what is this success based on?

My response is twofold. When it was founded WaterAid was unique among development charities in owing its origins to an industry: in our case water. We have perhaps forgotten how revolutionary this was twenty years ago.

The term civil society had then scarcely been invented, and the thought that there might be mutual benefit in industry working closely with a charity would very likely have been treated with suspicion by both sides. WaterAid's success is proof of the benefits.

A second reason is that we have stuck to our original remit of water and sanitation. From the first we knew that potable water was essential. We did not take sanitation as seriously, until early project evaluation showed that safe waste disposal can almost double health improvements, particularly when combined with hygiene promotion.

This last resulted in our only change, so far, to our legal aims and objects to include it. The resulting trio is a very powerful combination to improve both the well being and future prospects of those communities we reach. I have learned that drinkable water is the best entry point for development to every community that lacks it. It is an essentially simple message which everyone can understand.

Our time commitment to each community with which we engage is substantial, creating trust and loyalty. We constantly refine our methods to ensure the communities we help take responsibility for what we and they have achieved together, so that the work endures in the long term. Independent evaluations of our work confirm this.

I therefore hope we are never tempted to stray significantly from our chosen trio, although, particularly in the matter of where hygiene promotion should end and broader health education begin, it can pose difficult moral choices on the ground. Early on we decided that it was better to work through local partners, rather than ourselves be the implementers.

We can be proud that in several countries we have helped develop partner organisations, whose influence and activity is major. This has involved the transmission of management and financial skills that are frequently in woefully short supply in those countries.

Our trustees insist on high standards and controls to this part of our work and their audit committee continually monitors them. The resulting locally trained staff are vital to their countries' economic futures.

WaterAid has matured as an organisation, but maturity can risk complacency or losing one's innovative edge. So I will end by throwing out a few future challenges.

Following an invitation from the World Bank we have hosted the secretariat of the World Bank's Business Partners for Development initiative for three years, but have yet ourselves to carry out work on the ground in partnership with a substantial commercial water and sewerage contractor and local government.

We are expanding our urban work very encouragingly and learning much, but if water and sanitation services for the urban poor are ever to reach the scale needed, such partnerships will be essential.

Many others have water projects which increasingly follow the community based management models we have developed, but sanitation is often ignored or seen as less important. We are one of the leading international development agencies taking long-term sanitation seriously as a major part of its work.

We should not be shy to publicise this and encourage further collaborative work with other international development agencies to make projects more holistic.

We have already won recognition for our expertise in the field. We must now continue working to broaden and share our depth of knowledge to make our name better known in Britain and beyond.

I look forward to a future when WaterAid is recognised at home and internationally as the leading non governmental organisation in the drinking water and sanitation sector.

Read a brief history of WaterAid and its achievements