Susan Davis

Big Picture
The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century , Alex Prud’homme, June 2011
Quote of note:   Every time we use water – even for something as mundane as washing our hands, spraying the lawn, or generating power for light – it sets off deep and wide hydrologic ripple effects, with consequences that most of us are unaware of.  Now we no longer have the luxury of ignorance.

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste, Rose George, 2008
Quote of note:  Eighty percent of the world’s illness is caused by fecal matter.

Access
Progress on drinking water and sanitation: 2012 update. UNICEF & World Health Organization Joint Monitoring Programme.
Quote of note: The safety and reliability of drinking water supplies and the sustainability of both water supply sources and sanitation facilities are not addressed by the current set of indicators used to track progress.

A Silent Tsunami Revisited Extending Global Access to Clean Water and Sanitation, Harriet C. Babbitt & Malcolm S. Morris. October 2011
Quote of note: To date, there is still no clear understanding of what the sector has spent, where, how, and with what results. Without access to such basic information, it is a struggle to calculate a return on investment. 

Accountability
How to improve accountability and performance in humanitarian operations? By David Bonbright and Nicholas van Praag. posted October 20, 2011
Quote of note:  …without the right structural incentives, aid providers are unlikely to heed beneficiary feedback. Thus, in addition to a new methodology for asking questions—and getting more useful answers—we need to make the data publicly available, tracking and ranking the relative performance of different humanitarian organizations across programs and over time.  Such an index would act as a guide to donor support and an encouragement to aid agencies to take-up beneficiary feedback, so they score better in future.

Let’s Start a Charity Navigator for Program Effectiveness! Guest blog from Marla Smith-Nilson/Water 1st and Ned Breslin/Water For People. Posted September 2011. 
Quote of note: It has become overwhelmingly clear that the main obstacle in the use and maintenance of improved water and sanitation systems is not the quality of technology, but the failure in qualified human resources and in management and organization techniques, including a failure to capture community interest. An appalling 35 to 50 percent of such systems in developing countries became inoperable five years after installation.

The 2010 Humanitarian Accountability Report. Humanitarian Accountability Partnership.
Quote of note: Despite several [evaluations of humanitarian action] having strong coverage of accountability issues. . .in the final analysis all but one were judged to have omitted consideration of key components of accountability to beneficiaries and so did not qualify as systemic in their assessment. 

Effectiveness / Impact
International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) Working Paper 13: Can We Obtain The Required Rigour Without Randomisation? Oxfam GB’s Non-Experimental Global Performance Framework August 2011
Quote of note: Few of us in the international NGO community would argue against the importance of accessing trustworthy feedback on whether the interventions we implement and/or support are making a meaningful difference. Such feedback can give us confidence that we are on the right track or encourage another visit to the drawing board. It can also help prove the worth of our work to donors and supporters and even motivate others to model our efforts, thereby, leveraging additional change. However, the core issue that dumbfounds many of us is how to access credible intervention effectiveness feedback practically.

Collective Impact, By John Kania & Mark Kramer. Stanford Social Innovator Review 36, Winter 2011
Quote of note: Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organizations.

Costs
WASH Costing for Services that Last (slideshare presentation), by Catarina Fonseca, Patrick Moriarty, Stef Smits, presented March 21, 2012.
Quote of note: We don’t have to say if the data are bad or good, we just hold up the mirror. You don’t have to tell your sister she’s ugly – you just hold up the mirror. [Catarina said this during her presentation.]

“Water and sanitation: priceless but not costless,” Stef Smits, Programme Officer at IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. Posted October 23, 2011.
Quote of note: If the government is to lead a process of standardization of intervention approaches, it should be based on a good understanding of the costs of these approaches. Then it will have some data to assess which of the approaches are most cost-effective and what realistic cost ranges are for different settlement types. It may even help identifying where there is room to reduce costs and improve efficiency. It may also gain further insight into how these costs can eventually be financed and where there are gaps in financing the sector.

Learning
“Water Services That Last: Creating a Learning Sector,” Triple-S program.
Quote of note: People need incentives to participate. ‘Talk shops’ will not keep people on board. Learning alliances should be formed around real problems that people want to solve.

Principles into Practice: Focus on Results, Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). February 17, 2011
Quote of note:  While M&E plans help identify early results during implementation, and signal whether programs are on track to meet their goals, it is important to wait for impact evaluations to confirm income gains attributable to MCC investments.

Research / Studies
Community-Based Well Maintenance in Rural Haiti, IDB Office of Evaluation and Oversight. Working Paper OVE/WP-06/11, September 25, 2011.
Quote of note:  Wells managed under the community-based approach are 8.7 percentage points more likely to be functioning after only one year.

Lorna Fewtrell and John M. Colford, Jr. Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: Interventions and Diarrhoea A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. July 2004.
Quote of note: Multifactorial interventions consisting of water supply, sanitation and hygiene education acted to reduce diarrhoea but were not more effective than individual interventions.

Jeffreys, Kendralyn G., “A Survey of Point of Use Household Water Treatment Options for Rural South India” (2012). Public Health Theses. Paper 190.
Quote of note: While India has made significant progress in increasing people’s access to improved water sources in the last twenty years, there is still considerable work to be done in the areas of improving water quality and addressing sanitation and hygiene practices. Introducing a culturally appropriate and community accepted point of use household water treatment system is one of several interventions that may reduce rural villages’ burden from waterborne diseases.

Jeff Albert, Jill Luoto, and David Levine.  End-User Preferences for and Performance of Competing POU Water Treatment Technologies among the Rural Poor of Kenya. Environ. Sci. Technology. 2010, 44, 4426–4432
Quote of note:  POU product dissemination at scale to the poor will not occur until we better understand the preferences, choices, and aspirations of the at risk populations.  We hope that similarly rigorous investigations will occur in the other regions, using other study designs, examining in longer time periods, and testing other products.

Ranjiv Khush and Alicia London, Aquaya Institute. Evaluating the Sustainability and Impacts of Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Interventions. October 2009.
Key findings: 1. Improvements in water and sanitation infrastructure are sustained; 2. Behavior change has not kept pace with infrastructure improvements; 3. The improvements in water and sanitation infrastructure provide non-health benefits; 4. Intervention villages have improved source water quality but not household water quality; 5. The intervention programs have not provided discernible health benefits; 6. Perceived economic benefits of improved water infrastructure are low.

Funding
Popularity of Water Grants Slows After 2007 Peak, Chronicle of Philanthropy, March 22, 2012.
Quote of note: Giving to [water, sanitation, hygiene] causes, however, still made up only 1.7 percent of international grant making by U.S. foundations in 2010.