Co-director | Growth Hub
Volg
Stef Smits is a senior programme officer and Co-director of IRC's Growth Hub. He has 20 years of professional experience in water supply and sanitation in over 25 countries in Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, and South Asia. His main thematic expertise includes: institutional models for water supply, sustainability and enabling environment, monitoring, costing and financing of services and integrated water resources management.
Stef has led numerous projects on these topics, and published about them. In addition, he has ample management expertise: from consultancy assignments to multi-annual programmes, and units within an organisation. He has worked for a range of clients including bilateral donors, development banks, research funders and NGOs. Stef holds an MSc degree in Irrigation and Water Engineering from Wageningen University, The Netherlands.
One of the myths that keeps on going around in the rural water supply sector is the one of 'full cost recovery'. As more data from rural water monitoring systems becomes available, the myth gets busted. Read more...
Achieving scale through associations of municipalities Read more...
As countries, regions and municipalities are making plans to reach universal access to WASH services, a frequently heard question is how much does it actually cost to provide services to everyone in the area? This week's "weekly WASH graph" will provide some magic numbers of the costs of reaching '... Read more...
Marcala municipality in Honduras is spending a decent amount on WASH, though not yet enough. Read more...
For less than US$12 per person per year a town in Honduras can ensure that everyone's water supply keeps working. Read more...
Based on a review of the costs of 179 water and sanitation projects carried out by FHIS (Honduran Social Investment Fund) over the last five years, we established the unit cost ranges for different intervention models. We also identified the main factors driving the costs of water and sanitation... Read more...
Jacques Dutronc's song sums up how the WASH sector is waking up to the Paris Declaration, cleaning up the mess of often uncoordinated aid efforts. Read more...
So said Luis Romero of CONASA (the Honduran water and sanitation policy-making body), in response to the graphs below. Read more...
I have written before about our work on life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) in Honduras. The idea is to look into the real costs of investment programmes and projects in Honduras, so see which intervention model is the most cost-effective. Read more...
Just as Orpheus descended into the underworld to bring his wife Eurydice back to life, the water sector invests heavily in bringing broken-down water supply systems back into function; often to find those same systems slipping back into disuse, as soon as the engineers turn their head to look away... Read more...
Could lack of definition be undermining the impact of effective but costly support? Read more...
“ We just take the programmes as they fall upon us, with their conditions. One donor uses a per capita threshold of 150 US$/capita and wants us to follow one approach, and we will do that. Another uses a threshold of 250 US$/day, but with another approach, and a different degree of community... Read more...
