In this fifth article about 35 years of joint learning on information and knowledge sharing by IRC and our partners, we focus on some key developments that helped shape us into what we are now.

They include:

• The first independent, international evaluation to assess the effectiveness and impact of IRC's work in strengthening partners in developing countries.
• The great task of learning about, documenting and disseminating experience on community management of water supplies in 22 communities with six partners.
• The increased collaboration with the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC on advocacy and communication strategies, development of putting the InterWATER guide of organisation online, and publishing Council news in our newsletter.
• The development of the IRC web site in 1996, which in its first full year recorded 42,000 page views.

External evaluation

1995 marked the beginning of an external evaluation of IRC. With support of the Governing Board and funding from DGIS, an external team representing Africa, Asia and Latin America interviewed IRC staff on key issues. They subsequently interviewed nearly 200 people from partners and main players in the sector in these regions about their experiences with IRC and asked them about strengths and weaknesses. An independent international steering committee of seven members guided this evaluation.

The evaluation team concluded that IRC's greatest strength was in ?software?, integrating social and economic factors with technical aspects. The team said that IRC had much to offer in continuing to apply that strength to rural water and sanitation, and suggested gradually expanding this to peri-urban settings and water resources management.

The evaluators also recommended that IRC could make its best contribution to the sector by focusing on capacity building through partner institutions in developing countries. These recommendations resulted in a reorganisation and a new business and medium-term plan, which led to increased work with our partners. New staff were recruited to concentrate on these new areas and on resource centre development.

Community management action research

Many lessons emerged from a challenging participatory action research programme to improve rural communities' management of their water supply systems, known as the PAR-Manage project. The research phase ran from 1994 ? 1998 in 22 communities in six countries from the South, Cameroon, Colombia, Guatemala, Kenya, Nepal and Pakistan. This involved a joint learning exercise between an international team from IRC and the local teams from six organisations world-wide.

The community management programme developed approaches, methods and tools to enhance the capacity of rural communities to manage their own water supply systems with appropriate backup support and guidance.

Between 1998 and 2002 the lessons were documented and shared in a mixture of face-to-face meetings, e-conferences, articles, books, videos and training courses. On the basis of this joint learning process IRC together with WEDC, Plan, WaterAid, SKAT and the WSSCC organised a conference on Scaling up Community rural water supply in December 2001.

Work with the Council

At its Third Global Forum in Barbados in 1994 the WSSCC gave IRC a new mandate ? testing advocacy and communication strategies in Guinea Bissau. The project ?Focusing on Environmental Health: Communication and Training for Water and Environmental Sanitation? (PROCOFAS) made programming more effective through changing the way the water sector operates and the way that extension services operate in ministries. The local project team, which had no expatriate staff, worked in 15 villages with a combined population of about 9,000 people. Field work had increased to include 50 villages and 20,000 people by the time the civil war erupted in 1998.

The Council also encouraged IRC to take the lead in developing advocacy programmes on three key issues in the sector using its network of global and local partners. These programmes were: improved programming through communication, people and environmental sanitation, and people and troubled waters. The Council also agreed to support the InterWATER initiative to enhance collaboration among developing countries and external support agencies. Since 1998 the InterWATER guide to selected organisations has been updated and is searchable online.

One of the first concrete topics on which this collaboration was tested was the Global Environmental Sanitation Initiative (GESI) which began in 1997 and became the Sanitation Connection in 2000.

News from the Council was incorporated into our Water Newsletter (1994-1997) and, since July 1998, into the joint Source Bulletin.

World Water Day support

As part of its commitment to advocacy work IRC has provided support for the UN's World Day for Water every year since 1995, when the theme was ?Women and Water?. For themes in later years see our web site. Water and Disasters is the theme for 2004

Web site development

IRC's web presence was triggered by the development of InterWater collaboration in 1995. In 1996 this began by putting the company brochure and the newsletter online on the IRC web site. In its first full year, 1997, the site recorded 42,000 ?hits? (page views). In 1998 we added library services and InterWATER pages. As electronic information was becoming increasingly important for IRC and its partners, a new staff member joined IRC to redesign and expand the Internet site. The number of page views on our site and our World Water Day site increased substantially over the years to over 900,000 page views in 2003.

Since 1997 and 1998 IRC not only maintained its own site, but also the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council site and the GESI site.

Transfer of short courses to partners

By 1995, 10 partners in developing countries had developed their capacities with help of IRC to the extent that they could now run three short courses in their own countries, which IRC had developed and tested since 1986 in the Netherlands: Management for Sustainability, Operation and Maintenance, and Hygiene Education. In 1997 IRC for the first time omitted a course (on Management for Sustainability) from its training programme in the Netherlands. In later years other subjects were also dropped in the Netherlands, signalling the successful transfer of skills to our partners. Now IRC focuses on training of trainers, tailor-made briefing programmes, international workshops and exposure visits in the Netherlands.

Five new titles and four translations.

To improve access to information for Lusophone Africa and South America, an agreement to translate several IRC publications into Portuguese was reached in 1996 with the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) Mozambique. SDC distributed to the Portuguese-speaking African countries Working with Women and Men on Water and Sanitation: an African Field Guide, translated in 1996, together with titles translated in 1997. IRC then distributed the Field Guide to nearly 90 REPIDISCA cooperating centres in Brazil, along with an earlier translation of Drinking Water Source Protection: a review of environmental factors affecting community water supplies. These Brazilian REPIDISCA centres, together with the other 305 REPIDISCA centres in Spanish-speaking Latin America, also received a copy of the Spanish translation of Organizing local documentation services for the water and sanitation sector: guidelines.

Contact: Dick de Jong, jong@irc.nl

Tags: capacity development, information and communication, monitoring & evaluation