 Well, hello everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, depending where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C, for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest installment of our 2018 webinar series on the topic of post-construction support for rural water systems. My name is Yana Aranda, and I'm the president at Engineering for Change. I'm joined today by our guest moderator Nancy Gilbert, who is the executive director of Transform International. The webinar you're participating in today will be archived on our webinar page and our YouTube channel. Both of the URLs for those that are listed here on the slide. Information on upcoming webinars is also available on our webinar page. E4C members will receive invitations to our upcoming webinars directly. If you have any questions, comments, and recommendations for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact the E4C webinar series team at webinars.engineeringforchange.org. If you're also following us on Twitter today, I invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. Now, before we move on to our presenters, I'd like to tell you a bit about Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a knowledge organization and global community of more than one million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists who are leveraging technology to sell quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities worldwide. Some of these challenges may include statistically modern sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture, and others. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and thought leaders, insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our Solutions Library, professional development resources, and current opportunities such as jobs, fellowships, funding calls, and more. E4C members enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with the E4C site, the better we'll be able to serve you resources aligned to your interests. For more information, check out our website to sign up. Now, a few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's practice using WebEx together by answering the question of where you are in the world. In the chat window, which is located in the bottom right of your screen, please type in your location. And I'll go ahead and get us started. Here we go. I'm dialing in today from Brooklyn. And I see already folks adding their locations. We have Nashville, San Jose, Virginia, Salt Lake City. All right. Now, I can see some people, Scotland, pretty far away here. I can see some people also answering the Q&A, and I see some answers for Denver. But I would like to ask you to please use the chat window for all of these answers. You can use the chat window. If you don't see on your screen, try clicking the chat icon on the top right hand corner. Moving forward, feel free to use the chat window to share remarks during the webinar. If you have any technical questions, you can also just send a private chat to the Engineering for Change admin. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window. Look at it below the chat to type in your questions for the presenter. That way we can keep track of them. Again, if you don't see the Q&A window, look for the icon on the top right of your screen. I see here folks from Indianapolis, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Houston, Florida, D.C., all over the United States, Mexico, India. Fantastic. We really thank you all for joining us today. We're so excited to have you with us. Please continue answering that question. We'd love to see where you all are from. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. For those of you who are professional engineers, E4C webinars qualify you for a professional development hour. To request your PDH, please follow the instructions at the top of the E4C professional development page after our presentation. You can also find a link for PDHs in your online dashboard if you're an E4C member. Special note about today's webinar. We do have quite a few presenters, so we may extend it for an extra few minutes for additional Q&A if we run over. Now, I'd like to take a moment to tell you about today's webinar. Service providers worldwide are working to deliver clean water to underserved communities and ensure that rural water systems operate indefinitely. While there are debates, there are debates about best approaches to post-construction support and adaptability to changing consumer needs. So, we invited Nancy Gilbert, who is the Executive Director of Transforming International, to help us navigate this debate with three water systems experts who will share what has worked and why. And Nancy is also a tremendous expert in her own right. She leads Transforming International, which is a network of independent centers training and development practice through shared knowledge and experience. She's a lawyer by profession and has a doc of social science from Royal Rhodes University where she studied ways to improve sanitation in the Niger Delta. Previously, Nancy worked with P&D Foundation developing their appropriate technology program in the Niger Delta focused on Wash, Agricultural Development, Energy Efficiency, and Irritables. She is an active Rotarian and has volunteer with Wathrag, the Water Sanitation Rotarian Action Group, and is a member of the Wash E-Club. Welcome, Nancy. I'm going to head it over to you to introduce our presenters. Thank you, Ayanna. So, we have three presenters today. Laura Burns from Water for People, Amy McColl from the Desert Research Institute, and Duncan McNichol, who's the General Manager of Wave Solutions. I want to welcome you all to today's webinar. As Ayanna said, we're looking at ways to ensure long-term sustainability of rural water systems and what needs to be in place post-construction to ensure the sustainability. So, to start today, I'm going to provide a brief introduction and hopefully some context. And then we're going to hear from our three presenters. It'll be followed by a Q&A. And at the very end, we have two slides we've put together with some suggested resources and further reading, so we'll show you those. For a water system to function well, someone has to do the work of monitoring. I mean, you need to know if the system is working. Ongoing maintenance and repairs and replacement. And of course, you know, someone either has to pay for that work or else it needs to be donated. Revenue generally comes from one of more or more of three main categories. Tariffs, like user fees, taxes, internal public finance, or transfer external development aid. And someone has to organize and manage that system. Often, the default approach is to set up a wash committee, ensure that there is a good gender balance on it, provide training, and assume that they are going to be able to run the system for the long term. But in many instances, ensuring that long-term service provision is actually much more complicated. Does post-construction support mean it starts after construction? Well, definitely not. Long-term sustainability is something that needs to be addressed from the beginning of any wash work. Thinking through how a wash system will function into the future is a critical part of effective planning. In terms of functionality, what are we aiming for? It's important to note the difference between water point functionality and sustainability. Whether a water point is functioning as desired at any given point in time is good to know. It's important, but more important to know is whether it's able to deliver service over time. Some degree of downtime may be inevitable, but if overall service levels are good, then it's a sustainable source of water. There was a recent World Bank study of community management of water systems and I encourage you to have a look at it as a ton of fabulous information. But it identifies five general service delivery models, and each, of course, would have its own considerations in ensuring sustainability. The first one was family or household-based supported self-supply, where a family pays for its own borehole or pump and either self-maintains or hires a technician. There's not much documentation available, but there does appear to be a need for more communication around household water treatment and safe storage, capacity building for local providers, and standardization of approaches. Secondly, were community managed systems, and the World Bank study found four general types, unsupported community groups, secondly, formalized societies with some form of support, where support was delivered through government entities or utilities, membership organizations, or other pooled arrangements within regions. Thirdly, community-based organizations that contract private sector actors, and fourthly, community organizations that federate into associations to receive support. The third general category were private sector provisions, which showed good promise and lots of diverse arrangements, and they scored well on financing, and somewhat also on asset management and monitoring. But the study found critical barriers and capacity gaps that need to be addressed for greater improvement of this model. The fourth was local government provision, generally found to not be so effective. It's often there's a difficulty in keeping those tariff revenues separate and, you know, a challenge functioning in a commercial manner. However, central government can provide an improved environment through technical support, financing arrangements, legal support, that kind of thing, so have a critical role to play in all of this. The last was a public utility model, and although this wasn't common, it was found to provide the best conditions for sustainability, because they tend to have professional management, more qualified personnel, better financial capacity, and access to funding, and be subject to monitoring and regulation. How you approach ensuring sustainability will, of course, depend on the service delivery system, but here are some considerations. It's really important to think through what service delivery models make sense and will be accepted in your region. There's some good resources on this in the resource slide, so I'm not going to repeat that now. Secondly, look at how finances fit in. This is a really critical area to address, both how do financials and financial incentives fit into the overall plan. And here's a suggested resource, the wash cost calculator. Thirdly, whenever possible, support government activities and capacity building. And lastly, be aware of common issues and how they may be mitigated or addressed. For example, the distance to water points or access to spare parts have often been found to cause some extra challenges. And again, as I said, there's some useful resources on that in our slides at the end. There are lots of common issues that come up in... I'm trying to get this to scroll. There we go. In addressing the sustainability post-construction delivery service, I'm going to just mention a few from this list. Lack of qualified operators. There's often a poor level of knowledge and capacity in a local region. And I've seen this. Sometimes, when you train someone, then they move away because now they've got a marketable skill. So that can be a challenge. Poor quality of initial system setup. You know, if the technology is poor out of the starting gate, you're more likely to have breakdowns and problems, and it's going to cost more. So that can be an issue. Lack of incentives from users to water committee members to maintenance people is the system set up to incentivize the behaviors that are needed to make it function well. And lastly, let me speak to the last point, inadequate monitoring of systems and reporting on issues. It's critical to have a way of monitoring and not just hardware functionality, but also other items, like, for example, governance. How do you know that the governance setup is working well? So there are lots and lots of pieces to this puzzle and things to think about as you work through it. Last but not least, I think we all have a role as advocates. And just as this quote says, you know, effective leadership is required to bring rural water to the top of the political agenda. There's no question political will is key, and we could help to encourage that. Our presenters today will share their experiences. And our first presenter is Laura Burns. As I mentioned earlier, Laura is the regional program officer for Latin America for Water for People and supports five country programs, helping develop operational plans, budgets, and internal reports, providing programmatic support, and serving as the hub of regional information for headquarters staff. Laura will be followed by Amy McCow. Amy is the program coordinator for the Desert Research Institute Center for International Water and Sustainability. And last but not least, we'll hear from Duncan McNichol, who's the general manager of Waves Solutions in Uganda. So as Iana said, please feel free to type questions into the chat box at any time. We'll have time for Q&A at the end of the three presentations. And if you want your question to be addressed to a particular person, just mention that in your typed question. Thank you. And Laura, over to you. Great. Thank you so much, Nancy. I'm really excited to be here today speaking with all of you about the way Water for People approaches sustainability and post-construction support. Water for People is an international nonprofit working in a total of nine countries. We work really closely with local partners and local governments to establish strong connections that will support our work after Water for People leaves. So in 2010, Water for People began implementing a model we now call Everyone Forever. And this was because we saw that the way we were implementing projects just wasn't working. We were doing scattered infrastructure in many different countries, and it was failing. And so we decided that in order to really improve the way we were implementing and promote sustainable services long after Water for People left, that we needed to look at the entire ecosystem and develop a much more system-based approach. And to do this, we identified four main components that we should focus on. The first is infrastructure. This is the easiest. It's working to achieve full coverage. So Water for People works in specific geographic regions. This can range in size from 12,000 people in a municipality to over 200,000 people in a district. And we work to ensure that there's infrastructure that will reach every household, school, and clinic with improved water services. While perhaps the most expensive, this is usually the easiest part of our work. And the more difficult portion is what you see in points two through four. So we're partnering with local governments and promoting local ownership and leadership. We're promoting improved financing to cover the full life cycle of infrastructure. So Nancy mentioned the importance of life cycle costing, and that's looking at the initial capital investment. It's looking at operation and maintenance of a system and the eventual replacement costs of a water system. And finally, we're working to promote the capacity development of local actors so that they can manage and maintain services and ensure that they have the finances to cover all operating costs. We're so excited about this graph if we've been working on it for three years that you're going to see this twice, so I won't go too much into detail on it. But I wanted to show it now to really get back to what Nancy had mentioned, and that's that post-construction support doesn't happen after construction ends. For us, we see sustainability, the forever portion of our model, as happening at the same time as our infrastructure work. It's really important to start with sustainability from the very beginning. And you can see in this blue box that we are implementing our infrastructure activities at the same time as our sustainability activities in the very beginning. We're working on baseline monitoring, capacity building of our local partners, financial assessments, developing district plans for wash infrastructure. We're working on water resources management planning, of course the infrastructure, and implementing annual monitoring and reflection. From there, we then move into, once infrastructure has been implemented successfully, a complete sustainability focus. So to do this, we see that there's these main building blocks for sustainable wash systems. The first is institutional arrangements and coordination, and that relates directly to regulation and accountability. It's ensuring that there's a national and local government that's going to support sustainable water services, and ensuring that there's service authorities and service providers that will oversee those systems as well. It's, of course, the implementation of infrastructure, as well as the operation and maintenance of that infrastructure. It's annual and often more frequent monitoring, which then leads to learning and adaptation, as well as planning. It's focusing on the financing, so that full life cycle costing that I mentioned before, as well as just ensuring that there's a district budget for water and sanitation services. And it's focusing on water resources management. So to really deliver on all of these components of wash systems, Water for People focuses on three pillars of sustainable service. The first is the service authority. So this is the authority responsible for regulating water and sanitation services. They oversee the service providers, and it's often a district wash office, or a municipal water and sanitation office. We also work to develop service providers, and these are the individuals or the committees responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of specific water systems. So this could be a private operator in Rwanda managing dozens and dozens of pipes water supply systems. It could be a water committee managing one borehole in Malawi, or it could be a water committee in Guatemala managing one pipe water supply system. And the third pillar of sustainable services is water resources management. It's great if you have a service authority and a service provider, but it doesn't matter if you don't have water that individuals can access. And so water resources management for us is a critical part of our work, and it means ensuring both the water quality and the source protection. And we break it out from the service authority and service provider because water resources management is really transboundary and is the responsibility of everyone, the authority, the provider and the users. Once we came up with these main components and as we continued to work on building the pillars of sustainability, we realized that we needed a better way to measure the performance of these different actors and these different services. And as Nancy mentioned, it's great to monitor infrastructure and functionality, but that wasn't enough for us. And so water for people developed the Sustainable Services Checklist. And I realized that this graphic is not wonderful, so if anyone wants an actual Sustainable Services Checklist, feel free to reach out to me at the end of the webinar. But the Sustainable Services Checklist is an Excel-based tool that's used to measure the potential for sustainable services and the likelihood of sustainable services by looking at the service authority, the service provider, and water resources management. So scores are developed through a series of interviews with the authority and the provider, as well as using our annual monitoring data that's collected. And you can see here that we're looking at the structure, the finance, the management, and the monitoring of the service authority. And we're looking at the structure, finance and operation and maintenance of the service provider. And with water resources management, we're looking at whether there's a water resources management plan, whether there's a water source inventory. We're looking at whether water quality is tested. And from there, we come up with our scores. And so you can see from looking at this, and so vertically are all of the countries and districts where we work. And across the board, you can look at specific districts and see their scores. And you can see a lot of red, which in this case is not good. And that means that those are areas that we're struggling with. And so you can see for water for people, finance is an area where we need to provide enhanced support to our service authorities and service providers to ensure that they can really provide sustainable services. So we're using the sustainable services checklist to really understand what support we need to provide these actors moving forward. But the sustainable services checklist is also important for helping us understand when it's time to exit. So we're back to this famous graphic. I've already talked about the first bucket, the blue building everyone forever. And we know we can move from that stage of our implementation when we've reached those three milestones that I mentioned at the very beginning of my presentation, when we've reached every household, every community, and every school and clinic with improved water services. At that point, we move to a complete sustainability focus. So water for people is no longer investing in infrastructure and is instead investing on the sustainability portions, including continued capacity building, institutional strengthening and advocacy, and supporting annual monitoring and reflection. We know that we can move from this forever focus to oversight only when the sustainable services checklist is green for the service authority, the service provider, and the water resources management. So we're using that tool as an indicator of when we can move on. And at that next stage, oversight only. Water for people is no longer investing any funding in the district and instead is providing monitoring, support, and review role. At that stage, we look at exit criteria. And this exit criteria for every district is whether service levels are maintained for a period of time, whether sustainability scores are maintained for a period of time, and whether context-specific requirements are met. So right now, Water for People Country programs are working on establishing these specific requirements for exit. And once those are met, Water for People can exit a district without any investment or feature oversight, knowing that because of the post-construction support we provided and the sustainability work we did from the very beginning, the sustainable water service delivery has been established. And from there, I'm going to pass it off to Amy from DRI. Thank you very much, Laura. That was terrific. So I will just move on to sort of start introducing DRI in our Center for International Water and Sustainability and how we are approaching post-construction support and sustainability of wash systems. So I think Nancy did a great job outlining the problem. So as you all know, as she noted, small water systems often struggle to provide reliable and safe, sustained water service over time, with 22 to 67% of water pumps breaking down after only one or two years after construction. And this obviously directly impacts the targeted public health and socioeconomic goals of wash system investments. So, and that's one of the primary focuses of DRI and our Center for International Water and Sustainability. So for those who don't know, the Desert Research Institute is the environmental research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education. We have a long history of expertise in applied research focused on the improvement of environmental resources and specifically water. So we, with funding from the Conrad and Hilton Foundation, DRI established the Center for International Water and Sustainability, Sea Wash, in 2013. The mission is to essentially leverage DRI's expertise in environmental sciences to conduct research and provide capacity building that we feel is essential to improve the long-term sustainability of wash systems, particularly in rural communities and developing countries. So I'm going to focus most of my discussion today on the International Circuit Rider Program, DRI host, which is specifically focused on addressing sustainability challenges for rural water systems in developing countries. But before doing so, I just want to highlight a few of our other programs that are focused on sustainability challenges for wash systems. So DRI is not an actual service provider and we don't construct infrastructure for such. Instead, we partner with local NGOs and governments to help them address sustainability challenges, both from the design perspective of wash systems and also post-construction. I'm getting back to Nancy's point that sustainability does not begin once the system construction is finished. So the first program I want to discuss briefly is just our what we call our water sanitation and hygiene capacity building program. This is a training program we offer to NGOs, staff and governments, local staff in developing countries that's focused on building their capacity to more effectively design and manage over the long-term water systems. We have a certificate program in International Wash we offer, which we are now excited to be enrolling our third cohort of students in this program. We've graduated two cohorts already and this is designed for a longer term certificate program for NGO staff. We've also run week-long training programs for government staff and NGOs focused on specific sustainability issues. So for instance, we ran a program for World Vision staff from five countries in Latin America this past year. The second partnership I would like to highlight would be DRI has partnered with the University for Development Studies in town of La, Northern Ghana to establish the first in its region wash center. The purpose of this wash center is to focus on specific sustainability challenges faced by water sanitation and hygiene systems and water resources in West Africa. We were excited to hold our first international conference in January and look forward to holding an annual conference each year. UDS has also been an integral partner in our wash capacity building program with faculty from UDS participating in our instruction as part of the wash capacity building program. On a more macro scale, our hope is to partner with local institutions in developing countries so that eventually all of these programs will translate into their greater capacity to sustain services, to help develop professional training to sustain services over time. We also have been working in Liberia on a wash resiliency project there. DRI was awarded a grant from UNIFAC to conduct hydrogeological studies and geophysical investigations to help identify sustainable borehole sites at healthcare facilities across Liberia. This is part of the Liberian government's post-Ebola public health efforts to just ensure that the impact of another outbreak will be lessened by ensuring that that sanitation and hygiene is sustainably available in these healthcare facilities. We are also at Sea Wash supporting the Liberian government in developing the country's water quality standards and establishing baseline water quality parameters. The program I want to focus most closely on today is our International Circuit Rider program. So Sea Wash is a toast to this International Circuit Rider program, which is a model that's been proven to increase the long-term sustainability of small rural water systems. This program began in the United States under the governance of the National Rural Water Association in 1976. Essentially, the Circuit Rider model employs traveling technicians who rotate through a number of small communities providing ongoing support and assistance, proactively addressing problems before they arrive and providing technical administration and fiscal training to water boards, water committees, and any other stakeholders involved in system operations. Depending on the individual program, each Circuit Rider would visit 20 to 40 small water systems four to six times a year. We tailor this model to address the specific needs of the country or community in which we're implementing. So the services of Circuit Rider's provider technical assistance on system repair, maintenance of infrastructure, source water protection, water quality, and that type of thing. Administrative guidance is provided to improve the governance and financial management of the system including appropriate tariff settings for long-term sustainability of the maintenance of the system. Capacity building is also provided to water committees and boards for promotion of wash activities. And then support is also to touch back on Laura's point. We also try to provide support for employment of integrated water resource management and watershed management. As noted, if the water is unavailable, all efforts at sustainability fall flat. So there are several advantages we see to the Circuit Rider methodology. The training for Circuit Riders provides them with a wide range of skills, which often make them more broadly marketable. So while they can be engaged in Circuit Rider activities, they're also able to market those skills out further, which ensures a greater level of consistent engagement. Regular visits obviously mean problems identified on and oftentimes that means that the solutions are much less costly and it doesn't require a system shutdown to address. Circuit Riders check on a wide range of wash services and thus provide benefits to the community more than just keeping the water flowing. They provide sanitation and hygiene training. Again, fiscal and governance oversight and such. So as I mentioned before, the Circuit Rider methodology started in the United States under the National Water Association in the 1950s. Half of the households in the U.S. didn't have pipe water to their homes. Through the Circuit Rider methodology, there were approximately 52,000 community water systems providing water to 300 million people in all 50 states. The program costs per system is $195, $10 per person in rural communities. We found that the Circuit Rider programs are most effective in remote communities for approximately 1,000 people that have been grouped together to share resources to support this methodology. The program in the U.S. is subsidized by the U.S. government and is organized by states. DRI is currently running three Circuit Rider programs, the Circuit Rider-like programs, one in Honduras, one in Ghana and one in Chile. A central component of each of these programs is partnership with local government and local organizations and NGOs to ensure that ownership resides locally within the country. So in Ghana, DRI is collaborating with the Ghana Community Water and Sanitation Agency, which is responsible for rural water service provision to implement a Circuit Rider program in the East Goinsha district in northern Ghana. So in the East Goinsha district, there's an area mechanic that is assigned to each zone. One of the struggles of these communities is they can't afford the payments of parts or labor. Area mechanics often work at a loss or communities are left without water. So CWSA, excuse me, and DRI are working to adapt the Circuit Rider methodology to fit within Ghana's existing model and enhance and improve the structure that's already in place there. So thus far, we have completed a needs assessment and the Circuit Rider workshop was held for the Circuit Riders, East Goinsha district staff and area council leaders, a small business training and motor tricycles for better transportation have been provided, and a monitoring and evaluation framework and ongoing refresher trainings are in the pipeline. In Chile, DRI is collaborating with local organizations toal in the municipal government of the region of Rio Hedardo. In Rio Hedardo, there are nine community water boards which manage their own mechanized water systems. Communities have well-functioning water boards. They have warehouses with spare parts, and they collect tariffs regularly. The general capacity building system improvements in organization amongst the community water boards is what was required. So toll, DRI, and the municipal government have partnered to create a municipal water office. New Circuit Rider has been hired to help organize the water boards to kind of generate an economy of scale and system improvements for projects for the local water works ministry. DRI's program in Honduras is now entering its second phase. So we have partnered with Rotary to ensure their long-term sustainability of wash investments in Honduras and also internationally. There's over 90 Rotary-sponsored water systems in Honduras, and this investment totals over five million U.S. dollars. So DRI has partnered with Wash Ray and the Honduran Association of Water System Administrators to help design more effective post-construction support for these Rotary systems, part of which is going to employ the Circuit Rider methodology. The first phase of this project, which was supported by Wash Ray, Rotary Vino, the Rotary Vino Club, excuse me, Walsh and Ives Foundation, and basically involved in assessment of the functionality of 34 Rotary systems throughout Honduras. The final report of findings and recommendations was completed, and based on these recommendations, we've determined that the most systems are operational. Most of them are not providing water 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and are not being optimally managed and run. So the second phase of the project will be to take these recommendations and with funding from Walsh Genetic and also new support from the GEIS Foundation to deliver capacitively workshops that will address the technical knowledge gaps of these small water committees and water boards identified by the field study help with infrastructure improvement to try to ensure the long-term sustainability of Rotary's investments for the public health and socioeconomic benefits envisioned by their investment in the country. So lessons learned through our Circuit Rider program so far the Circuit Rider methodology provides a low cost per household for sustainable access to water. There's greater investments, monitoring time than communities with no focus construction support. There's a need for autonomous community water boards and committees. Coordination among governments, NGOs, and other stakeholders is essential. The community understanding that a service is being paid for is vital. There's definitely a need for improved capacity building both technical, financial, and administrative from the inception of a project to post-construction support. And there's a need for validation and support for water committees. We've also identified some outstanding research needs. The comparison of communities that are employing the Circuit Rider methodology to those without Circuit Rider program needs to be looked into. Better monitoring and evaluation at the beginning of Circuit Rider program needs to be accomplished. Better information on the cost, including time, money, and effort of building systems, how long they're supposed to last, how long they actually last. Advocacy tools to advocate for greater funding is also needed. And documentation and dissemination of best practices, lessons learned, and recommendations. And to share these out more wildly, which is something we at DRI are certainly striving to do. So that's an overview, essentially, of DRI and Sea Wash's sustainability initiatives. And I will, at this point, pass it over to Duncan. Yeah, to take over. Thanks very much, Aimee. And thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I'm joined here by my colleague, Elizabeth Bovengero, our communications officer. Today we'll be talking a little bit about our work in Uganda, establishing a public-private partnership for reliable rural water access. And specifically, we'll be talking a little bit about the WAVE model for preventive maintenance and different ways that we're experimenting with the model to achieve viability so that costs can be recovered locally and services can continue to be provided without reliance on external donor support. And with that, I'll pass it over to Elizabeth to take it from there. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. So I'm going to talk about our vision as WAVE, and it's pretty simple. What we want to achieve is reliable access to safe water in rural communities. This means that the sources are 100% functional every day, and whoever wants to fetch water can always get it anytime that they want to. And the reason why this vision is achievable is because that infrastructure exists. The challenge is maintenance. Approximately 20% of the sources do not work. So when one stops working, the communities move on to the next one until they find themselves in a situation where they're fetching water. For as far as four kilometers away from their homes, or they opt for contaminated sources. So what we're trying to solve is the maintenance problem so that communities can have reliable water flow. We are doing this through public-private partnership with local government because we recognize as a non-profit social enterprise that working with the local government is the only sustainable way of achieving reliable access to safe water. So the government, local government especially introduces us to the communities and we work with local technicians to upgrade or repair existing water sources. And communities pay an annual tariff for the maintenance services. It's basically like an insurance. And we assure them that there are water sources that are going to function once they pay that annual tariff. We also work to strengthen the enabling environment. Here we engage local government leaders by signing memorandum of understanding and play an advisory role in coming up with standard constitutions and establishing tariff payments. The local government regulates our work through regular assessments and we've been having quarterly reviews where they tell us where we need to improve. I'm going to explain the way our public-private partnership works. It starts with local government because for us to have a sustainable model that works in the whole of Uganda the local government leaders need to be active participants and they need to have buy-in in the whole process. So they are the ones that are responsible for mobilizing communities and they mobilize the communities to register as legal entities with bank accounts. Banking is specifically important because as we interact with the community members they tell us that they cannot trust other people to keep money. For instance, if they have a community member who keeps money in their house they don't trust that. But when they have bank accounts then they trust that the process is going to be very transparent. And then the community signs preventive maintenance agreements and then we contract local technicians to maintain the water sources so that communities have reliable water supply. Our results so far show that there is great promise in this public-private model of rural water supply. We work in five districts and as of 2017 we had 143,097 customers but this number has of course increased in 2018. On average we have achieved 99% functionality of the water sources so that means that 99% of the time the water is flowing in the rural communities. We've also worked on customer satisfaction surveys. This is something that we're trying to improve over time but so far we are seeing great a great reception from the communities. They are happy with our services and they would recommend it and the leaders are very enthusiastic about what we are doing and they go their own way even as far as mobilizing more communities and recommending the services that water is providing. So that's where we are now. I'm going to hand over back to Duncan. Great. Thanks Liz. So as Liz mentioned WAVE is a non-profit Ugandan social enterprise and for us the key goal here beyond the numbers of how many communities are being reached is viability because we believe that viability means sustainability. Basically if incentives are aligned and costs can be recovered locally then we've established a system that can continue to work beyond when donor funding is available. And crucially we have technicians who are motivated to provide a quality service. They are paid on performance where they are penalized for breakdowns and they are motivated to keep pumps working. Communities are motivated to pay in advance for preventive maintenance services and maintain quality services and then the government is motivated to support this system so that it reduces their overall costs and increases the overall functionality of the system. And to do this there are three key things that we as WAVE think need to be achieved to solve this viability challenge. The first is to provide a quality service that people like that they are motivated to pay for. The second is to recover some costs locally without external subsidy. And the third part is to do this at scale. And what I want to share with you next is a few of the experiments that we're trying in each of these categories to see what is possible because we have some things that are working some things that are working less well and some things that we think are possible and we're trying to explore in partnership with governments and with communities and with technicians to see what can create a truly viable system. The first thing I want to talk about is quality spare parts. We were looking to see can we establish quality spare parts supply chains even to the most remote corners of Uganda. And it turns out we can. Because we're supplying spare parts for over 360 communities now we have more purchasing power and we can go to the top quality vendors we can negotiate better rates and we can ensure that from the capital to these remote corners spare parts are available and that they're at a higher quality and lower cost than would be available otherwise. Another thing we've explored is upgrading some of these sources we serve to solar pumps with stand taps. Technically we can do this but the economics also need to work and it turns out that not every one of the sources that we serve is right for upgrading to a higher level of service that people might be willing to pay more for. But it looks like it won't work in every case. A third thing we're looking at is shock chlorination where you can add a dosing of chlorine to a source to improve the water quality if it's contaminated. Technically we find we're able to do this the technicians are able to perform it and the cost is quite low but we find that over the long term the results are unreliable. The next group that we're looking at is recovering costs and the first thing I'll talk about is the de-mobilization and the establishment of bylaws. As we've worked to develop these public-private partnerships in the five districts over the past several years government has been increasingly enthusiastic about the service and about preventive maintenance ensuring that pumps don't break and that they're consistently maintained and they've become increasingly strong partners in communicating the importance of these maintenance services to communities helping to set prices, the tariffs waive as a service provider and others as well. They've also established bylaws to say that yes, communities should have preventive maintenance services and that there should be a minimum contribution towards that to cover these costs. Another thing we're exploring we're still not sure how it will work if it will produce the expected results but one thing we're finding is that when we maintain pumps initially if we're looking at the life cycle costs of a facility the costs in the first few years after a major repair are quite low and therefore this provides us with an opportunity to invest that money in something like high interest government bonds to then grow that money so it can cover larger repairs down the road and this is a financing strategy that we're looking at to basically invest in local institutions to leverage a financial opportunity where smaller community contributions at regular intervals to cover the life cycle costs of upgrading pumps. Another thing we're looking at is metered revenue collection where we could have someone monitoring payments on a per gerry can or per flow rates quantity but it's something that again seems like it won't work in every case. And then finally I want to talk about some experiments and scale where we've been looking at how can we reach everyone and the first thing we've been doing is looking at how we can minimize the initial cost of repairing facilities. Often when we come across pumps where communities want repairs there's been a lack of maintenance over the past few years and often significant repairs are needed. We've been looking at this from the perspective of instead of doing major rehabilitations where we overhaul the entire pump can we continuously upgrade parts as needed over the longer term and be able to expand more quickly. And it turns out that so far that's working quite well and that's something we'll continue to do. Another experiment we're running is looking to see if we can cover all of the sources within an area a sub county for example and if we can normalize the services where everyone and their neighbors are all paying for preventive maintenance services and this is the norm then this will help service to a greater scale more efficiently. Because basically we've come a long way we think in terms of establishing a viable model but there's still lots of experimentation to be done to see how this service can be consistently maintained using only local resources and so we'll continue to experiment in these different aspects to see what's possible and hopefully achieve viability also when we reach sufficient scale when we get to coverage of a whole district for example that we've when we can have enough people paying for the services to achieve an economy of scale. While we're doing that we're also documenting the processes to prepare for replication and we hope that we can show a model that can be sustainable and viable throughout Uganda in the future. I want to just quickly wrap up with a few implications for other people thinking about this. I really want to emphasize this idea of viability is sustainability I've touched on this and Nancy brought it up right at the beginning. Think about those cost recovery service models. Think about where the money is going to come from and who is motivated by that in order to continue providing services in the long term. Related to that this idea of a public-private partnership working with existing institutions to achieve efficiencies and to sustainably provide services we think has a lot of potential. We're seeing good results in Uganda and there might be a model that applies equally well in other places. The third thing is to encourage experimentation. We don't know for sure what is going to work until we try it and I encourage you to test some of those assumptions to get out there and meet with people and try little pilot experiments and see what can truly be sustained. Thanks everyone for your time and our contact information is at the bottom if you'd like to reach us. Thank you Duncan and the other presenters Amy and Laura. We do have some questions that have been posted and I'm going to direct the first one to Amy and Duncan as it seems timely. A question was asked who trains the technicians and what does the training include? Duncan do you want to start? I can feed off. Go ahead and then I can follow on. In our case we generally leverage DRI faculty and faculty from local universities also we engage consultants in the wash sector to train technicians and essentially what we usually do is start with a needs assessment. We conduct a survey of technicians and of local water boards and communities to identify what they perceive as the outstanding capacity needs to sustain their systems effectively and then we tailor for instance our circuit rider methodology we tailor it for the individual communities in which the circuit riders will be working within so the area mechanics in North Angana for instance the training that's provided to them addresses the very specific needs that are that have been identified by they themselves and community water boards and such so it's very important for us to be close partners with those people in the communities every day to ensure that training delivered is really addressing the very specific needs recognizing that the needs across different communities in different certainly different countries are very distinct so that's how we generally approach it and so we generally work closely with local partners in designing the training program be it a week long workshop or a longer commitment to ensure that we're we really are tackling the issues that are hampering their ability to provide water service sustainably over time thank you in short wave provides the training and that's part of our work to establish the enabling environment and also to continue with the service provision in our cost models we're looking at covering the cost of labor in a transport of spare parts and then also some of that management cost that's needed to provide ongoing training and then manage things like spare parts supply chains performance management of the technicians and things like that so very much a model that resembles a service utility where the cost of training is built into the ongoing operations. Well it's a follow-up question in a sense but to both to Amy and Duncan the question was the wave maintenance model and the circuit rider system sound similar in working with government and preventative maintenance could the panelists perhaps contrast their models and strengths weaknesses this may be a difficult question to answer but it's an interesting question sure I can start with that if that's alright sure I think that the concept is very similar this idea of sort of distributed service delivery where you're trying to establish a network of technical support that can provide ongoing support basically to sustained service levels I think the idea is very very similar and I imagine where we differ substantially is in the execution when we look at what's needed to what types of costs we have to cut to achieve viability in very remote parts of the country such as Caramoja the way that we need to partner with local institutions and their capacity to provide those are the details that we spend a lot of time working through with our partners and with our staff and with communities and I imagine there's quite a bit of variation there even if the general principle of having technicians servicing a large number of sources is similar yeah I would I would probably echo what Duncan said I think that the specific circumstances in which you are employing in which we employ the circuit rider methodology for instance what's what we're doing in Chile what we're doing in Honduras what we're doing in Ghana while they're based on the same general foundation principles sustainability the program looks very different and I think to Duncan's point you know it it needs to be it's very regional specific and so I imagine that a significant difference in how we're achieving like the administrative fiscal and technical sustainability over time it differs at least for DRI just program to program so I'm confident it's very different you know you know with Wave and DRI as well so yeah a question for Laura have any water for people projects reach the exit phase of your attractive theory of change diagram yeah that's a great question and none have reached that stage yet although we're getting closer which is really forced us to start thinking more about that exit criteria and what really needs to be met in order for us to exit the closest we are is in some of our districts where we work in Bolivia where we're moving further along but as of now most of our programs are still at the everyone forever blue bucket the very beginning of our work a question was asked what tools spreadsheets databases have you found to be most useful and efficient in storing managing and disseminating water supply data any comments on that this is Laura and I'm going to say that I'm not going to focus on the tool but what water for people has found is most important is really working together with district partners to walk them through the data that we've collected and in many cases that they've collected as well to spend that time analyzing it, discussing it and really laying out a plan moving forward so not so much a tool but a really important step for us is that discussion right so not just collecting data but making sure it's actually used in it and that the government understands it exactly and I would echo what Laura said I think there are various tools that can be employed but certainly it seems from my perspective the most important is how the data is analyzed and then how it's disseminated and shared with local partners and engaging them in the process as well to ensure that results and recommendations are a partnership effort and are used to inform future program efforts so again I think it's not really addressing the question of tools but it's a more process I'm sorry. I would say we experiment with a lot of different things and I also echo that the process is more important than the specific tool and we're sort of adapting things all the time based on both needs and the capacity of who we're sharing with for example when we share what quality results back with communities as part of our routine monitoring the mechanism for that is quite straightforward as is the key performance indicator sheets that we share with government where we expect them to hold us accountable they're not big databases it's really just the highlight reel how many people are we serving are we ensuring that pumps are repaired within a day, these types of things and that also evolves based on their input Okay, thank you I'm going to try to fit in two more questions before we round up a couple of people asked this in different ways what factor or factors would you deem most critical in identifying communities as best chance of sustainably maintaining a rural water system or do you do that how do you pick where you work I think is the question really and is it important to vet a community before you begin I mean I'm happy to comment on our end I think for DRI the communities we work in are communities where we have established partnerships so we have established partners who have established relationships I think ensuring that there is that local buy-in and local participation so for instance our work in Northern Ghana is informed largely by DRI's historical work in West Africa and in Northern Ghana our partnership with the University of Development Studies in Tamale has been a vital part of our wash capacity building program but also our circuit writer program for these going to district so I think having established establishing the local relationships is vital for us in Honduras it arose out of you know there are colleagues on our team that are Ricarians and we were approached by Rotary and so again it was there was a level of community interest and investment in pursuing the project and I think that is if you're asking how we target where we work that as crucial component of it Laura Stokin do you want to add to that at all? Sure I can build off a bit of that so exactly what Amy said ensuring that there is the local buy-in is really important for water for people we're working at a district level so making sure that the district government is bought in and is really going to be sharing that message with all of the other communities within the district with which we're partnering is really important. In many cases because of the national level advocacy water for people is doing we are meeting with national governments and they are helping us select the new districts in which we should enter based on their needs and desires and based on the local government in each one of those districts. If I can add from the community side as well we have criteria before communities can become eligible for different kinds of maintenance costs or services rather some of those go to government where government needs to support the community to register as a community-based organization and open a bank account and then communities need to pay at least a chunk of that service fee before we'll then start providing them services so there's quite a level of commitment from both governments and communities before they can access the services that we think helps them want this and so it makes it very demand-driven. Right, and they have to demonstrate their willingness. Exactly, great. Okay, I'm going to try for one last question if that's okay because I thought it was such a great question. How can we convince funders and social investors to take risks and experimentations? Any thoughts on that one? I mean I'm happy to start and I don't have a particularly brilliant answer. Prior to my time at DRI this is a personal background note. I worked at the Cameron and Hope Foundation so I have experience coming from both sides of the conversation. I think the big challenge with sustainability is water surface delivery and infrastructure construction is very concrete and understandable. I think it's a more complicated conversation to at least from DRI's perspective as somebody who doesn't actually build the infrastructure but we're trying to build the capacity. I think it's just creating the enabling environment and building a greater base of knowledge and disseminating learning around this and sharing findings and creating a level of understanding amongst funders of the importance that if you're going to invest this much money in this infrastructure these water systems whose ultimate goal is not just to deliver water but to deliver concrete community development, socioeconomic public health benefits from design through implementation through post-construction sustainability needs to be a part of that discussion so I think honestly my first thought is it just comes down to education and conversation around the importance of this issue. I'd say it's something that we really struggle with and told me, talked to me about the importance of finding the right funder for the right risk and I think the more funds I work with the more that resonates where there can be a real tension between the intensive establishing sustainable viable service delivery models but then the funding mechanism is still set up in a hit the target liquidate by the end of the quarter and receiving revenue is a little bit weird for some funders and then there can be restrictions on what you can do with that so the idea of investing that to grow those finances into something that can meet full life cycle costs those, depending on who the funder is, those can be quite strange things that might not fit with their processes and I think it's been a challenge for us to find funders that fit with this idea of developing a non-profit social enterprise that someone asked about returns where we can't guarantee a return of whatever percent to say we'll create a profit but we do want to recover costs and establish a viable model Garth, did you want to comment on that? No, I think what Amy and Duncan said is absolutely correct and I agree with both points both trying to find the donor that fits what you're working on as well as really documenting what has worked, documenting those pilot projects that have been successful not just so that your organization can be supported but other organizations as well. Great, thank you. I think we'll wrap up the Q&A at this stage. I want to thank everybody including Engineering for Change for hosting this. I hope it's been useful. I think it's critical that we all share the knowledge that we're gaining and this is a difficult area and something that we're only going to do better at by sharing and learning as widely as possible. So thank you so much for participating both as a presenter and a participant today. So for all of you who are listening to us still today, there are some suggested resources that are shown on the slide right now. Please take a look at those. We encourage you to reach out to us if your question was not addressed today. Thank you for staying a little bit over. I also want to make sure that we have your pdh codes for those of you who are taking your professional development hours. The pdh code is listed on the current slide here. I would like to thank all of you for attending. We are so excited. We had over 100 participants from around the world today and we are thrilled about all the questions that were asked. I know we didn't answer some of them. There is an opportunity for you to follow up with us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org and we'll be happy to share those questions with our panelists. And finally, I'd like to thank our panelists. This was a really rich conversation covering so many really timely topics and we're grateful for the time you've taken to spend with us. For those of you who are also interested in the Spanish version of this webinar, it will be happening tomorrow at the same time. Please share the information with your colleagues. If you have colleagues in Latin America who are watching on these challenges or other Spanish-speaking countries, please do share that information. We are so keen to have this conversation in a language that is useful for them. So thank you, everyone. Have a fantastic morning, evening, or afternoon, wherever you may be. And we will catch you on the next episode of the webinar. Bye-bye now.