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Goal 4: Inter-Sectoral Dialogue and Alignment

Goal: Improved inter-sectoral dialogue and planning alignment

Desired outcome: By 2016, the departments, agencies and private sector organisations that play a central role in sustaining WASH service delivery in rural and urban areas (e.g., local government, energy, health and education) will better integrate their efforts and align their plans and budgets. This will become increasingly important in areas experiencing rapid urbanisation and increasing water scarcity.

Published on: 04/07/2013

WASH services that improve people’s health and livelihoods must support access to water for both domestic use and productive activities. This demands coordination between traditional WASH and other sectors, such as health and agriculture. In its 2012 work on multiple-use services (MUS)—the use of domestic water supplies for small-scale productive purposes, such as home gardens and livestock—IRC actively pursued inter-sectoral collaboration and dialogue, as evident in the following activities:

  • IRC continued to host the secretariat of the MUS Group and co-organised a well-attended MUS Group meeting in the United States. Strengthening IRC’s communication and advocacy activities was identified as a strategy to share the growing body of evidence on the benefits of MUS.
  • The Rockefeller Foundation has provided funding for IRC’s MUS communication and advocacy activities for 2013, and the 17 organisations that form the MUS core group have pledged financial and human resources to the network’s activities.
  • IRC contributed five country studies—on Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Nepal, and Tanzania—to the MUS network’s scoping studies, which explore the opportunities and barriers in scaling up MUS.
  • IRC co-authored Guidelines for planning and providing multiple-use water services, a practitioner’s manual for implementing a MUS approach. It includes a guide to tools for supporting the provision of multiple-use water services in various contexts.
  • IRC’s programme in Ethiopia emphasised MUS through MUStRAIN, a pilot project focused on using sand rivers for domestic livestock and small-scale irrigation through integrated approaches that meet multiple water needs.

In 2012, IRC also explored how the health, agriculture, and education sectors, both public and private, could help support sustainable WASH services for all.

  • IRC conducted a case study in Bengaluru, India, on an informal sanitation service provided by small private companies and found it viable: the system safely handled urban sanitation without a sewage plant and pipes. The published study was featured in India’s New Agriculturist website.
  • Under the Dutch government’s public-private subsidy arrangement, IRC was successful in mobilising the support of traditional non-WASH actors as partners— Rabobank, CISCO, the Hilton Foundation and SkyFox—for its SMARTerWASH project in Ghana, an initiative that will begin next year.
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