The following is a guest blog from Marla Smith-Nilson/Water 1st and Ned Breslin/Water For People
“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”
This quote sounds like something you probably 
heard at an international WASH conference this year, but it is actually from a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) report released in 1981. Regrettably, in the past 30 years, that particular metric has not changed. The sector’s failure to respond can only be characterized as ap palling. It’s time to change. Maybe we need to create a third party to intervene and assess our work.
Most people are familiar with Charity Navigator, which provides free financial evaluations of America’s charities. A four-star ranking is the goal of every organization out there
and we work hard to keep that percentage of annual expenses devoted to program above 80%, 85% if we possibly can. But when it comes to program outcomes, donors only have the information we provide about ourselves. There is no third party source of information about effectiveness and sustainability of projects. We fill out our own report cards and we tend to give ourselves straight As. So donors place their emphasis on the financial analysis provided by Charity Navigator. But isn’t what you accomplish with the funds you expend the more informative of the two methods of evaluating an organization?
We think a third-party review of program effectiveness would be a great resource to both encourage strong project implementation and drive donors to support programs that are doing sustainable work. And there are methods by which we, as a sector, can make that happen. One approach we are interested in trying is an Accountability Forum through which implementing agencies pool resources to fund a rotating evaluation process. This concept has been used in other sectors where associations have rules or standards for membership in order to differentiate their work from other organizations. Participating groups agree on a set of sustainability standards that would be applied in the evaluation. They identify a reputable, knowledgeable and impartial evaluator to apply the standards on a site visit. Then they gather to conduct an assessment of one member organization’s projects in key areas such as water supply, water quality, toilet coverage, hygiene education, community organization and collaboration with other organizations in the sector.
In addition to member evaluations, this process also allows for valuable cross-fertilization and exchange of ideas by field staff involved in program implementation. At the end, the organization evaluated gets a rating of its work: Does it meet basic standards of sustainability and project effectiveness? Does it approach the sector’s best practices in every category? Is it encountering serious challenges to sustainability and can the group help develop steps and strategies that would bring the organization up to basic standards?
We announced at last October’s Sustainable WASH Services at Scale meeting in Washington DC (hosted by Water for People, IRC and Aguaconsult) our intention to test the approach this December in Honduras, in what we are referring to as the Water & Sanitation Accountability Forum, Central American Region. Water 1st and Water For People have committed to being part of this inaugural forum and we are hoping that other groups implementing work in Honduras or surrounding Central American countries will joins us. Groups can participate as full fledged members or as observers. The goal is for participation to be entirely voluntary and for membership to lead everyone towards better program outcomes for the ultimate benefit of the people we serve, the world’s poorest.
