A day in the life of...

Christiane Randrianarisoa-Rasol, Senior Programme Manager, WaterAid Madagascar.

Credit: WaterAid

Christiane Randrianarisoa-Rasol, Senior Programme Manager, WaterAid Madagascar

"Today I got up at my usual time of 5.30am, ready to arrive at the office by 8am. It's normally a one hour commute as long as there are no traffic jams.

While I prepared the packed lunches for the four family members currently living in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, I let my mind wander; thinking about my job with WaterAid, my professional career and, why not, life in general.

I compare each part to dishes that need to simmer: every day, we create new ones or prepare them in a different way.

As Senior Programme Manager for WaterAid Madagascar in charge of water, sanitation and hygiene programmes and projects implemented by our partner organisations, I have the opportunity to experience those innovations that everyday life keeps bringing to us.

This morning, for example, we discussed processes, methods and tools to ensure that the projects financed and supported by WaterAid meet the demands of communities, use appropriate technologies and also looked at the resulting costs they will incur during the forthcoming accounting year.

This will be a typical year of our five year strategy, a strategy featuring one main dish: delivering safe water to communities in rural villages and urban areas. This dish requires a number of ingredients:

• Technical know-how to decide if the proposed option is the most suitable one

• Partners' capacity to undertake a project on time and in compliance with standards

• Ownership by the communities themselves - which needs to be developed from the very beginning

• Involvement from local governments - as owners of the infrastructures

• Advocacy targeted at decision makers to bring together other actors involved in sanitation

• Capacity building aimed at ensuring the communities can maintain their systems

• Promoting partnerships - so that we move forward together and don't work in isolation

We invest in all of these ingredients - it is the added value we bring through our work. When we calculate the cost of our projects in Madagascar it is £21 per person - but the added advantages resulting from all of the other activities is incalculable.

Here children show how clean their hands are!

Credit: WaterAid

Next was a Senior Management Team meeting where we discussed budgetary controls. This is done on a regular basis to inform us of our financial situation, helping us to balance what has been done and what is being planned.

However every single time the same question arises: how do you meet the myriad demands expressed by poor communities knowing that to yield maximum benefits from our capacity building work we must limit the number of partners yet, at the same time, we must support our partners' capacity to absorb funds without overloading them? It is a hard balance to meet.

Another dish was put on the table in the afternoon. With a few partners, we've been discussing how to maximise our work in Mahabo, a small urban town located in an area showing the first signs of drought. According to an initial survey of water and sanitation services undertaken by partners, 20.7 percent of households have access to safe water and 17.6 percent to latrines.

In order to cover the needs of the town as defined in the Millennium Development Goals and government targets, 605 water systems and 3088 household latrines need to be built in nine years. Our share would translate into 200 water systems and 1030 latrines to be built in the next three years.

Mahabo highlights one of the biggest issues in our country - the need for urban sanitation is huge and different organisations must work together to address the challenge. While WaterAid has a solid reputation based on its experience and methods regarding human waste management, other aspects such as household waste management and waste and stagnant water management do require specific expertise and fundamentally depend on defined urban policy and programmes.

In the case of sanitation services in Mahabo, the ingredients WaterAid will need to bring will take the form of support activities aimed at the government: advocating for the town's urban plan to be included in the central government's priorities, calling on government agencies to allocate the funds required to meet the lack of safe water and sanitation and developing partnerships to ensure the different components progress harmoniously.

My day's work show the variety of issues touched upon by WaterAid in its mission of helping the poorest people gain access to water, sanitation and hygiene. The varying ingredients surrounding safe water mean that no day is the same.

I know that the effort I put into my work is not only about safe water, hygiene and sanitation. It also contributes to other development: building local capacity, developing organisations, coherent management, building partnership networks, informing decision makers and influencing their actions. Such contributions cannot be seen in a glass of water, but I will wake up tomorrow and prepare another dish and another one..."