TopBackground
Water For People is an international non-governmental development organization based in Denver, Colorado, and currently active in eleven countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (see Figure 1). The organization supports the establishment of community water and sanitation facilities and hygiene promotion activities through local government, civil society, and private sector partners to fulfill its mission of “helping people in developing countries improve their quality of life by supporting the development of locally sustainable drinking water resources, sanitation facilities, and hygiene education programs.”
Figure 1. Map of Water For People country offices
Water For People’s scale of work is a municipality or a district, which is similar in size to a county in the United States and encompasses anywhere from ten to hundreds of communities. Working in partnerships is a cornerstone of Water For People’s work overseas. The philosophy behind partnering to bring communities water, sanitation, and hygiene services is two-fold: 1) by working in partnership, resources can be pooled and collectively more people are reached with these basic services; 2) long-term sustainability of services depends on the skills and resources of a variety of local actors-communities, local governments, local civil society, and the local private sector.
Historically, the organization did not have a systematic method of collecting data on work it supported. Throughout the years, lots of anecdotal, qualitative information had been collected about the impact of its work through programmatic supervision visits from headquarters staff and irregular donor tours to the work sites, but the organization, like many in the sector, could not speak to the sustainability of its work with quantitative confidence, nor could it draw from lessons learned long after the photos have been taken and the inauguration of boreholes completed.