Category: Uncategorized

No crystal ball, but insights on how rural water systems change

Carmen da Silva Wells's avatarwater services that last

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.

capture-20150218-122025 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. 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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Opinion: Failing To Learn From Experience

Water Journalists- Africa's avatarWaterSan Perspective

Angella Naturinda and Lynna Abaho
January 28, 2015

Weather experts predict a continuation of the current hot and dry weather conditions in most parts of Uganda. This weather condition which started immediately after Christmas has come with several challenges such as food and water shortage, wildfire, siltation, soil erosion, pests and diseases which are causing devastating loss to farmers especially those in south western region.

For several decades now, the South Western part of Uganda has experienced such dry conditions during the month of January that stretch up to March. What is so surprising is that people in south western region are not learning from this annual experience.

Some of the worst affected people are farmers and residents of Kiruhura district found in the Ankole cattle corridor of Uganda.

Most of the people in Kiruhura are pastoralists and therefore the dry spell means that their livestock lack pasture and water…

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Questioning water quality

from IRC

editor's avatarwater services that last

One of the main conditions for providing potable water services is that the service provider must be able to guarantee that the water is safe for consumption. But what happens when you live in an area where such services are not within reach? Can you be sure that the water that is available is safe for human use?

Find out more about a recent study on water quality challenges in rural areas of Burkina Faso carried out by IRC Burkina Faso, as part of the USAID/ WA-WASH programme.

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