John Kalbermatten, 77, former Senior Water and Wastes Advisor at the World Bank, died on Thursday, 26 February 2009. Born in Luzern, Switzerland, he worked as a professional engineer for the city of Bethlehem, USA, the World Health Organization, retiring from the World Bank in 1986. John continued as a private consultant for 14 years.

In his blog, Prof. Duncan Mara writes: "Low-cost Sanitation has lost its greatest Champion". Realising that the World Bank's "investments in sewerage were not reaching the poor, [Kalbermatten] persuaded the Bank to fund the 1976-78 low-cost sanitation research project", says Mara. "This produced some truly ground-breaking publications - for example, the three books on Appropriate Sanitation Alternatives", Mara continues [1].

"John then obtained funds from UNDP in 1978 for project GLO/78/006 for the Technology Advisory Group (TAG), which he established, to start putting the lessons of the research project into practice. TAG's successor today is the Water and Sanitation Program. Maggie Black's 1999 publication 1978-1998: Learning What Works - A 20 Year Retrospective View on International Water and Sanitation Cooperation details the work of TAG", according to Mara.

[1] More references to publications by John Kalbermatten can be found in IRCDOC

Related web site: View John Kalbermatten's guest book on the Connell Funeral Home web page.

Source: Connell Funeral Home, Mar 2009 ; Duncan Mara, Sanitation blog, 02 Mar 2009,

Tags: sanitation