IRC Burkina country director Juste Nansi gives his feedback on the international seminar on monitoring held in the second week of April 2014 in Ouagadougou.
Published on: 25/04/2014
It’s 40°C in Ouagadougou, not an ideal temperature when you’re hosting an international seminar on monitoring. Still, more than 200 attendees turned up in the second week of April 2014, while over 500 would have liked to participate. IRC Burkina Faso and pS-Eau were the co-organisers. We asked IRC Burkina country director Juste Nansi for his feedback.
What is the main take away message from the monitoring seminar?
supporting municipalities to develop adequate monitoring systems as part of their responsibilities as service authorities may be a focus for the sector in the coming years
Monitoring of WASH services at municipality level is still at an early stage in most of the cases shared in the seminar. The seminar confirmed (if this was still needed) that there is no way to properly manage and improve services without a clear set of performance indicators and an appropriate monitoring system that measures progresses and supports decision making.
Therefore, supporting municipalities to develop adequate monitoring systems as part of their responsibilities as service authorities may be a focus for the sector in the coming years as well as the need to incorporate these systems in post-MDG strategies and plans.
The seminar provided a wide range of concrete experiences from across the African continent which are expected to help sector players in developing or improving the monitoring of WASH services at the local level.
How did the seminar contribute to IRC Burkina Faso’s mission?
Part of IRC Burkina Faso’s mission is to stimulate the sector to learn and adapt. IRC aims to enable learning by sector players on issues and solutions related to providing “sustainable WASH services for all”.
The seminar has been an opportunity for the IRC Burkina Faso programme to provide a platform for learning and sharing in the sector on monitoring issues at the local level. Involving the local level is essential if we want to address critical issues such as the quality of services delivered, sustainability, full coverage, etc.
The seminar has also allowed IRC Burkina Faso to share with an international audience the results of IRC’s work in Burkina on developing and testing monitoring systems for rural water services in the municipalities of Arbinda and Gorgadji. For the past 8 months, IRC Burkina has been piloting a monitoring framework based on service delivery indicators to adapt data collection and analysis for decision making processes at municipality level. This framework is expected to be adopted shortly by the Ministry of Water for up-scaling at national level. Sharing this framework with an international audience and improving it based on experiences in other countries was therefore essential both for IRC and the Burkina Faso authorities.
As most of the participants came from Francophone West African countries, the seminar also supported IRC’s ambition to disseminate lessons learned from experiences in Burkina to sector players in these countries and indirectly raise awareness and provide solutions for “sustainable WASH services for all” in these countries.
The seminar has also been an opportunity for IRC’s partners - municipalities, regional and national water authorities - in Burkina that have committed to improve monitoring, to learn from experiences from other countries.
How do you think IRC’s new brand and website will support IRC Burkina Faso, in particular its work on monitoring?
Since 2012, IRC’s programme and activities in Burkina have been developed to implement IRC’s new vision and mission. Thus, IRC has positioned itself within the WASH sector in Burkina Faso as a change facilitator supporting the development, implementation and sharing of solutions to reach sustainable services for all by 2030.
IRC’s new brand and website enable the country programme to align staff discourse and ongoing operations at country level with the clear positioning of headquarters and to disseminate more adapted/coherent information with the help of shared communication channels and tools. The new brand is an opportunity to profile IRC within the sector and state again our vision and mission and by using appropriate support tools, mobilise stakeholders toward this achievement.
