All Systems Connect, The Hague, 2023. Photo credit: Robert Tjalondo (Rockin'Pictures)
IRC's Patrick Moriarty reflecting on last year's All Systems Connect International Symposium
Published on: 13/05/2024
No single conference or meeting changes the world. And if it looks like one did, it's because the world was already changing before the conference! What conferences, meetings, symposia can do, is to build community, amplify themes, inject energy and act as milestones on the road to change.
It's a year since more than 700 of our extended WASH systems family did all of these things at the All Systems Connect symposium in The Hague. Taking part in a festival of connectivity around the themes of people, justice, youth, empowerment, health, climate ... and how water, sanitation and hygiene connect to all of these.
Over the last year at IRC and across the One For All alliance, we’ve worked to internalise and move forward the agendas that our participants contributed to generating. 700 people and 250 presenters provide a vast (almost overwhelming!) download of brainpower, experience and innovation, and we’re still working through and internalising much of it! We’ve recently published All Systems Connect action agendas for Water-For-Health and Connect-Climate. Later this year we’ll bring out an agenda on Water and Social Justice. We’d love to hear what you think of them, and how we can connect to drive them forward. Towards the end of the year, we’ll also publish a major think piece and new training course on Systems Leadership – which was the red thread running through the whole symposium.
And, of course, in the meantime we continue to work with you and others in the growing WASH systems movement, uniting experts and activists to change and strengthen and connect WASH and other systems on the ground. Contributing to our shared goal of just, resilient, and empowered lives for all people everywhere.
If you were part of it, we’d love to hear what you’ve been doing since the symposium, how or if what you learned changed your thinking or approaches and if you weren’t, we’d still love to hear from you! And, as always, we want to thank you all for your continued energy, enthusiasm, and dedication to changing people’s lives for the better, permanently.
In the meantime, whether you were part of the 700 or only wish you were – here’s a little reminder of connect energy from May 2023.
At IRC we have strong opinions and we value honest and frank discussion, so you won't be surprised to hear that not all the opinions on this site represent our official policy.
what I see is that we tend to work in silos, and it's very important for us to not work in silo anymore...
Shomy Chowdhury
it is not just one person, it is not just one sector, but it takes the interest of all those people who will be affected
Dr Kodjo Esseim Mensah-Abrampa
when people connect then we have systems connecting
Dr Mary Ashinyo
