Experimenting with water service delivery

Published on: 02/10/2012

I had the privilege to spend much of the last two weeks in rainy and verdant Kampala, in the company of a big part of our amazing Triple-S country teams from Ghana and Uganda.  We were there to talk about our learning and research agenda, and to reassess our approach in the light of still draft findings from our on-going mid-term assessment.

As with most mid-term assessments, the picture of ourselves that we see reflected in the mirror held up to us by our assessment team isn’t entirely flattering.  Nevertheless, as you can’t blame the mirror for the face you see in it, we had little choice but to roll up our sleeves and move forward.

I interpret a large part of the identified space for improvement as revolving around the difficulty of communicating clearly and effectively what we are doing.  This is, on one hand, not that surprising.  Triple-S is explicitly informed by an understanding of the water sector as a complex adaptive system: consisting of multiple actors with multiple linkages and often unclear and contradictory rules of engagement.  We have sought to engage with the entirety of this system in Ghana and Uganda, to work with the main actors in the system towards a shared understanding of the overarching challenge – and a sector-wide search for viable solutions.  This is a very complex space in which to act!

That said, and while wanting to maintain our overall system-wide focus on, and understanding of, the need for sector wide and systemic change, we are carrying out a number of specific activities within this space and we need to tightly define and communicate these.

I really like the pair of diagrams below, that our friend (and former grant manager) Rachel Cardone did as part of a presentation that she gave when we visited the Santa Fe institute together in 2011.  Rachel was explaining how the Triple-S project differs to more traditional approaches in the identification and subsequent scaling of innovation.  The upper diagram describes the ‘traditional’ approach, the lower the ‘Triple-S’ – indeed IRC – approach.

 

The main difference is the amount of time and effort that is put into the series of steps that are taken BEFORE actually starting to ‘test’ an exciting potential innovation – what Rachel calls ‘socialising the concept’.   Much of the last 2-3 years of Triple-S work has revolved around this – developing a shared understanding of the vision and challenges of providing rural water services.  However, in the last six months or so we have moved decisively into the “test in a messy real world environment” (circled in red) section of Rachel’s diagram – the innovation incubator or development lab part of our programme.

What we’ve yet to do is to catch up our externally focused communications work to this fact – and to explicitly spell out the experiments that we are currently involved in – some as lead, some as support – all of which directly address identified areas of weakness – or gaps – in existing approaches to service delivery in Ghana or Uganda.

The list below is tentative – over the next few months our country teams will spend time on more clearly defining each experiment – setting out objectives, time-frames and means of verification where these do not already exist. I personally like the idea of supporting the creation of a development lab for the sector – as part of the move towards a learning and adaptive sector. [1]

It doesn’t mean that every experiment will come with an RCT attached – but it does mean that we will seek to find and promote the appropriate level of rigour and evidence for each experiment.  As such, I see this as a natural progression from our existing work on supporting – or establishing where necessary –broad sector platforms for learning – such as Ghana’s excellent Resource Centre Network.  And most exciting of all are early indications that a number of the more advanced experiments – are leady starting to scale.