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BPD Support to Partnership Projects in Water and Sanitation
Since 1998 BPD has worked with a number of partnership projects throughout the world to support partnerships that deliver water and sanitation services to the poor. The types of support available to projects is wide and varied: Mapping the territory
Insufficient analysis is often given to the context within which partnerships are formed and then attempt to operate. Similarly, frequently insufficient attention is paid to the key strengths of all stakeholders active in the delivery of water and sanitation services. Partnerships then fail to incorporate (or insufficiently incorporate) what is already happening on the ground activities of small-scale providers, communities own activities, company staff initiatives. BPD therefore proposes to assist potential partnership projects in mapping the territory. The aim is to help participating organisations better understand the context in which a partnership approach might be applied, define which stakeholders might be appropriate partners and what their contributions could be, what the broad objectives of a partnership project might be, and how the partnership project could best be governed. Assisting partnership formation
Partners often enter into agreements (formal or informal) without fully clarifying how the partnership will operate, what the governance structures will be, how they will measure their successes and failures (in terms of both the project and the partnership), how they will communicate their work to a broader audience in order to manage expectations, etc. BPD proposes to support partnership projects in their start-up processes to ensure that their foundations are solid, expectations clarified and roles and responsibilities properly negotiated (rather than superficially allocated). Individual partner assessments combined with joint partner workshops will assist in promoting such clarity of purpose and process. BPD has significant experience in knowing the questions to ask and the approaches to take to forge more realistic relationships between partnering organisations. Helping to maintain or review a partnership
While the context in which partnerships work changes, and partnerships themselves evolve, partnership structures often remain static. Partnerships can greatly benefit from regular reviews to ensure that current incentives, roles and responsibilities etc are all properly reflected in how partners communicate and in partnership structures. BPD can support on-going partnership maintenance in a range of ways, through mid-term evaluation, helping to capture the perceptions of target communities or other actors, and in other ways. Analysing the impact of partnerships and their effectiveness
Evaluating the work of partnership projects requires an objective approach that will view the partnership in its entirety. In Phase One BPD created tools and templates that allowed it to analyse the eight projects with which it worked. These tools and the analysis they allowed were greatly appreciated by the partners in these projects such tools can be tailored to other projects to allow partners to determine what results can be attributed directly to the partnership approach, what might have happened anyway, and what lessons can be learned for a particular institution to inform its engagement in partnerships in the future. Examples of prior BPD support
Since 1998 BPD has supported a variety of projects with which it worked. For instance, the KwaZulu Natal Project in South Africa asked BPD to run a workshop which analysed the evolution of their partnership (which brought together a range of actors to explore innovative solutions to serving the urban poor). BPD helped partners better analyse the context in which they had come together, their achievements in setting up partnership structures, and the changes that needed to be made to reflect evolution over time. BPD then returned to Kwa-Zulu Natal to assist with the preparation of guidelines on such partnerships, intended to spread the lessons of their experience within South Africa.
In Argentina BPD funded the work of an external consultant to evaluate the relationship between the Fundacin Riachuelo and Aguas Argentinas in Buenos Aires. A similar exercise took place for IIED-LA and Aguas Argentinas. Together with the Agence France du Developpement BPD funded an exercise to document the partnership in Dakar, Senegal and disseminate the findings.
Back in South Africa, as the Kwa-Zulu Natal partnership entered a second phase, with some new partners aboard, BPD ran a workshop intended to help the partners better understand their own expectations and objectives, develop overall goals and objectives for their work together and come up with a targeted set of indicators to monitor these. Conducting an internal assessment for partners to map out their own objectives and likely costs and benefits helped each to make an informed assessment going into the partnership. Financing
Partnership projects will not generally be asked to fund these support activities of BPD. In-kind contributions from participating organisations (such as provision of a venue, local transportation or other logistics) will generally be requested however. |
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