MERL Tech Lessons Not Learned in International Development

November 4, 2015 Editor 0

The world has made several commitments to water and sanitation, starting as far back as the 1970s, and leading up to the recent Sustainable Development Goals. Also over the past few decades, the development of the internet and cool data collection tools has enabled more and more organizations to share their evaluations and monitoring data publicly.

But is anyone actually learning from them?

Four years ago, I founded Improve International to address sustainability issues in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). Since then, I’ve been reading a lot of evaluations, research, and systematic reviews, some as old as the 1970s. One great resource is Watering White Elephants: lessons from donor funded planning and implementation of rural water supplies in Tanzania from 1988.

What I’ve noticed is that, in the WASH sector, we’ve been producing the same “lessons learned” for 40 plus years. Some of the lessons re-learned throughout the past four decades were summarized in Watering White Elephants. Others include:

• No more business as usual. It is now business as usual to say this.
• Long-term follow up is really important to get behavior changes to stick.
• It’s not about the infrastructure; it’s about the services.
• Isolated rural communities will have a hard time managing their own water services over time.

The sustainable development goals have us committed to UNIVERSAL sanitation and water. It’s time for us to stop reinventing the flat tire.

Why aren’t lessons learned?

Perhaps they are learned, but they don’t seem to be acted upon. I think the main reason for this is there is little accountability in the sector. Think about this: How many charity organizations do you know that have gone out of business because of bad results? How many foundations? Can a customer (aka beneficiary) call up the charitable organization or the donor and say their water point isn’t working?

Why do we need to learn from the past? Some people ask, aren’t good intentions enough? No. Bad development is doing harm. Failed water and sanitation services make poor people poorer, impact their health, and make behavior change even harder. We have a moral imperative to work smarter.

How can we really change? I have three ideas: independent ratings, design for action, and sharing is caring.

A Call to Action

So here is my call to action: You can design MERL Tech to collect & share data for action and learning. Keep in mind:

• Monitor ongoing services, not just the project. We need more than random snapshots of functionality.
• Plan Evaluation to be used as diagnosis not an autopsy. If we are about saving lives, we need to use evaluations for resolution of problems and reform.
• Research should be designed and used for change, not just conference presentations.
• Learning should come before and after programs. Let’s fail forward fearlessly and make new mistakes, not repeat the old ones.

In fact, my challenge to you is to come up with a new WASH failure that we haven’t identified in our literature search. I’ll give a $25 Amex gift card for the first person who leaves a comment on ICTworks with documentation of the new failure (deadline November 15).

Just remember, it’s important to learn and act on lessons, because it’s okay to reinvent the wheel, not to reinvent the flat tire.

By Susan Davis, Executive Director, Improve International

Go to SourceReprinted from ICTWorks

Categories: ICT