An initiative of UNICEF, in partnership with IHE-Delft and 2iE, supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Rural areas in Francophone Africa are where there the water sector is furthest from meeting SDG targets. UNICEF has launched “Strengthening Human Capital Development for Water & Sanitation in Francophone Africa,” in partnership with IHE-Delft (Institute for Water Education) and 2iE (International Institute for Water and Environmental Engineering, Burkina Faso), with support from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Uncovering skills gaps and the training opportunities already available
Between February and July 2026, the partners reviewed 85+ sector diagnostics and capacity needs assessments, interviewed 45+ regional and global experts, and aggregated over 1,000 training catalogues and webpages into a database of 550+ French-language training opportunities, each documented across 16 dimensions — the most comprehensive and actionable mapping of the region’s WASH training landscape to date. While this update focuses on rural water supply, the underlying data collection and analysis covered the whole WASH sector — water supply and sanitation, hygiene, and cross-cutting sector issues — across both rural and urban settings.
What the mapping shows
Of 74 mapped water-supply courses, only three address service management, performance monitoring and governance, compared with 24 on water quality and treatment and 22 on O&M. Rural stakeholders and the operational challenges they face – climate-resilient design, service management, financial viability – are comparatively underserved, even though rural areas are furthest from the sector’s targets.
Training also clusters at two extremes. Long academic degrees for engineers and senior technicians make up over half of all mapped opportunities and are concentrated in five Sub-Saharan African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, the DRC, and Senegal), with further French-language opportunities in France, Switzerland, and North Africa, leaving many countries without a major specialised provider. Short online courses, meanwhile, mainly reach managers and decision-makers rather than field-level operators. Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) opportunities are systematically under-documented online and less known and accessible to the local authorities, technicians, artisans and small-scale operators in rural areas.
Cost further reduces accessibility: the median short continuing professional education course costs €1,120 – more than double the €450 median annual tuition of an African university degree – and only 13% of these courses are free. Even when training does reach rural stakeholders, knowledge retention, scaling up training, and sustaining learning outcomes remain challenges. The main obstacles are staff turnover among trained personnel, insufficient funding levels and duration to repeat and scale up training and provide post-training support, and a lack of institutionalisation.
Designing training for rural contexts
Given that over half of continuing professional education courses are currently delivered online and self-paced, despite completion rates of just 10–25%, online training appears better suited to short, introductory content rather than stand-alone, long-format courses, and less appropriate for rural operators, who often lack reliable, affordable connectivity. Practice-oriented, modular training, combined with structured study visits, on-the-job technical support, and ongoing peer exchange/coaching, may offer a more effective approach, complemented by growing opportunities to use digital tools and artificial intelligence to provide tailored, continued support to learners after training ends.
Proposed early-stage directions
Four early-stage directions have emerged from the analysis so far, and will be refined through further consultations, including at the country level, on select design and implementation aspects. They will build on and coordinate with existing initiatives. While rural water supply is a central concern, they span the whole WASH sector:
- Developing priority training content on four underserved priority topics, tailored to Francophone Africa: rural water supply management, financial viability and governance; rural safely managed sanitation and support for household investment and financing; climate- and conflict-resilient water resources and rural WASH services; and improving WASH monitoring and regulation at service and sector levels using digital and AI tools.
- Strengthening national TVET systems: competency and certification frameworks and support to selected TVET and utility training centres with the aim to upskill local authorities, small-scale rural operators/service providers and utility staff, with a focus on lower-skilled workers; this action would draw on experience from the Global Water Center in Ghana and AFD in Togo.
- Promoting and scaling up alternative, workplace-based delivery: apprenticeship programmes, ‘chantiers-écoles’, on-the-job coaching, structured peer mentoring, and South-South exchange, building on and coordinating with RWSN’s own WASH mentorship programmes and other relevant initiatives.
- An African (or global), French-language Resource Hub and Help-Desk: an open-access, demand-driven technical support system responding to requests or matching them with available resources and expertise using a combination of AI and human expertise, accessible via website, mobile app, WhatsApp, and SMS or voice fallback for low-connectivity and low-literacy users, and connected to comparable initiatives in other regions and WASH sub-sectors (e.g. humanitarian).
Get involved
RWSN and its members with relevant experience, expertise, or training programmes to share are warmly invited to contribute and collaborate on the initiative’s future actions. For the full report and further enquiries about the initiative and opportunities for engagement, please contact fbouvet@unicef.org.
Contacts
- Franck Bouvet, UNICEF — fbouvet@unicef.org
- Gloria Nyam Gyang, UNICEF — gngyang@unicef.org
- Shirish Singh, IHE-Delft — s.singh@un-ihe.org
- Boukary Sawadogo, 2iE — boukary.sawadogo@2ie-edu.org
- Jérémie Toubkiss, International Consultant — j.toubkiss@gmail.com
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