Susan Davis

By Deirdre Casella and Carmen da Silva Wells 

The capacity to continuously learn and adapt is critical for dealing with complex challenges and future uncertainties. In this first blog in a series about ‘a learning and adaptive sector’, we discuss why learning is central to achieving water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services for life.

If our intent is to change people’s lives, water must flow forever, toilets must safely separate humans from faeces and good hygiene behaviours must be upheld. Yet, there is ample evidence that many water systems in the global South work poorly or break down altogether and that toilets fill up, break or are simply never used despite decades of efforts.

Clearly, we need to do things better and differently. A first step is understanding better what causes service failure.

Common challenges in our sector are:

• weak government leadership
• fragmented approaches and one-off projects
• diverging priorities, often driven…