Globaldev careers: The WASH specialist

ALICANTE, Spain — “Oh good, you're the washing engineer.” That’s what Monica Ramos, coordinator of UNICEF’s Global WASH Cluster, was told when she showed up at a Bolivian NGO as a Peace Corps volunteer and newly graduated engineering student almost 20 years ago. “Tomorrow, go and design a gravity water system, do some community work, and build some latrines.”

A baptism of fire, this marked Ramos’ entrance into the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector — commonly referred to as WASH — which can include everything from ensuring that people have access to clean water and that they’re using it efficiently, to building toilets and instilling good hygiene practices, and finding innovative solutions to these challenges.

In her career since then, Ramos has worked with multiple organizations, including Action Against Hunger, CARE, and Oxfam, to bring clean water and sanitation to those in the most fragile contexts.

“Right away, I caught the bug I guess you could say … It was a really good crash course to getting involved and Bolivia was quite interesting because it had the realm of humanitarianism, but also of development,” Ramos said.

While being a WASH specialist can involve working in some of the most insecure, high-risk and high-pressure environments, for Ramos, seeing firsthand the impact that a WASH intervention can have in a resource-constrained community makes it all worth it.

She spoke to Devex about the type of person it takes to be a WASH specialist in the humanitarian and development sector and how that role has changed over the years.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you see the impact of your work?

Being the person who's been able to develop a drinking water system for a community, to rehabilitate that, to help bring sanitation solutions, or improve hygiene behaviors and knowledge, that for me is really exciting to see.

It's really exciting to see uptake from communities and have them say “you've changed our lives.” The beauty of WASH is there's a lot of [knock-on effects]. Sometimes we don't sell ourselves very well. WASH opportunities in schools bring more educational opportunities for children, it brings more possibility for economic growth or opportunities for microfinance. When we also take a step back and look at the effects that the WASH sector can bring in the work that we deliver on the ground, it’s really exciting to see communities progressing and individuals being able to improve their well-being.

What are the biggest challenges of being a WASH specialist and what lessons have you learned to help overcome these?

Anyone attracted to this type of work has a certain idealism ... but what we all do is a job and it comes with a certain level of accountability, as well as a certain level of bureaucracy, so ... there’s still a need to be very structured and to understand that there is a mechanism and a system to international work. At times, particularly when we start to work with larger organizations that are quite well established, that level of systems can feel frustrating.

Particularly on the more humanitarian side, we are known to be cowboys or cowgirls and want to go out and save the world. We have a lot of really good energy, but I think something I had to learn throughout the years is how to manage expectations, work within larger machines, still deliver upon principles, and also provide a good response to those populations that we serve, recognizing that comes, sometimes, with a few hoops to jump through.

Sometimes the job is not as exciting as we probably envisioned. There's a lot of Excel spreadsheets, a lot of budgets, there's a lot of proposal writing. So as much as I know we all enjoy being in the field and really being in contact with those that we’re serving, sometimes we find ourselves a little bit more chained to the computer than we would like.

What skill sets have you found to be most valuable in your career?

For the WASH sector, the technical skills are key. So either a technical background or anything coming from public health are very important. Probably like any other career path, the people skills, your ability to communicate, and language skills are obviously very important in the international scene. And I would say your general ability to be flexible and go with the flow.

I don't think I've ever had a TOR [terms of reference, which define the scope of an activity] where I haven't delivered something beyond that or that hasn’t changed somewhere along the way. So I would stress the skill of being able to keep in mind your core values and why you're doing this job because there are a lot of demands and there are obviously easier jobs out there in the world to be done.

How have you seen your role change over time as the sector has changed?

When I came into this almost 20 years ago, you thought: “I just have to be an engineer, I just need to do technical work within the WASH realm.” But you quickly learn that the technical solution is actually not the most difficult part and that goes back to what I was saying about people skills and relationship building. At the community level where you have to resolve a land issue in order to get access to a particular water source, that has nothing to do with your technical capacity, that has to do with underlying issues or understanding societies, cultures, and norms.

Being an engineer and that technical person years ago probably was enough. Now we really have to be a WASH plus-plus and be up on everything, and I think it's great.

What type of person is best suited to becoming a WASH specialist?

It's someone dynamic, multifaceted, interested in learning, using their technical skills to serve others, and have an impact on others’ lives, but who recognizes it's a marathon, not a sprint. It's finding a way to take care of yourself so you're in the best mental and physical state to be able to deliver, particularly when you're in those really critical and difficult environments, because even [for] the best of us, it gets to you, it really does.