It’s hard to predict what impact investments and innovations in the water sector will have on citizens’ access to services. Understanding underlying mechanisms and potential bottlenecks of change can help decide how and where to invest resources, while also giving a more realistic picture of the time scale required.
Many interventions do not follow a straight line and have unintended consequences.
Carmen and Deirdre describe innovative work being done by IRC to better understand how water service delivery systems evolve and steps towards developing a bottom- up model that illustrates the potential long term systemic effects of individual level change.
Read more Will innovation lead to change? Darwin gives some pointers
An agent based model shows how individual actions give rise to new macro-level patterns, or emergent outcomes that are otherwise difficult to predict.
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Rural Water Supply Network - blog 