The value of a WASH-and-go approach

Two WASH organizations have halted operations in the past few months. They’re encouraging others to do the same.

Cambodian NGO WaterSHED closed in May, having worked since 2009 to bring rural consumers, small businesses, and local governments together to create supply chains to meet demand for sanitation products such as toilets and sinks. Global Water 2020 — a three-year initiative focused on advocacy for water access and security in low- and middle-income countries — followed suit in June.

Both say their mandates were for a set period of time with a focus on specific goals and urge other groups to adopt a similar approach.

There’s value in time-bound efforts, according to John Oldfield, principal at Global Water 2020. “The world has committed to virtually solving the WASH challenge by 2030, and ongoing ‘traditional’ programming will likely result in only more of the same important — but unacceptably slow — progress,” he said.

For Geoff Revell, a co-founder of WaterSHED, the idea that an NGO’s role represents an open-ended commitment is a mistake. Moving from that mindset to thinking about what might happen once an NGO is gone enforces discipline, sustainability, and scalability, he said.

WaterSHED has been in the process of closing ever since it launched, Revell said. “The goal was we’d make enough of an impact on the underlying causes of the problems we aimed to address, such that we could exit."

The number of rural Cambodians who have access to a toilet has risen by 54% since WaterSHED’s inception, Revell said, although this can't be attributed to the group’s work alone. The team also trained close to 2,000 local government leaders on how to create a vision and plan for community development with a WASH lens. Cambodia’s Interior Ministry and Rural Development Ministry have taken over WaterSHED’s role in the first government-led iteration of the training program.

Lim Potheary, deputy director of the training department at the Interior Ministry, told Devex that the country will continue to use WaterSHED’s model in the WASH space while also replicating it in other development fields.

“There should be a recognition that governments can be capable of tackling problems in a robust, responsible way before the need is gone and without foreign development assistance,” Revell said.

Global Water 2020 and WaterSHED aren’t the only WASH organizations to “sunset” after a set length of time.

Water Advocates launched in 2005, aiming to help triple the sector’s funding from the United States. It sunsetted at the end of 2010 after annual funding from the U.S. Congress increased to $315 million from what the group estimated was previously less than $100 million.

WASH Advocates, the successor to Water Advocates, closed in 2015 after just a few years of operation. And in 2019, The Soapbox Collaborative also closed after nearing the end of its initial budget, which had been used to drive seven years of work in improving hygiene at birth in health care facilities in low- and middle-income countries.

The challenges of time-bound work

Closure doesn’t come without consequences though, said Wendy Graham, a professor of obstetric epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and founder of The Soapbox Collaborative. The loss of a significant player can mean governments and United Nations agencies will be held to account less, as well as greater dependence on non-NGO actors and a loss of expertise.

Lim said WaterSHED has played a big role in Cambodia in providing knowledge around sanitation and in capacity building. However, the trainings it provided, as well as the plans and curriculum it built with local leaders, have led to local ownership of WASH goals, such as ending open defecation.

But building a project into a sustainable system can be difficult when time is lacking and can lead to mistakes, said Sydney Byrns, a member of the Hydro Nation Scholars Programme at the University of Stirling. “[NGOs] end up skipping over a lot of the longer-term, ‘moving-with-the-system’ type processes,” she said. Instead, they should move at the pace of the system at hand. Having a more flexible time frame allows for a better decision about when to leave, she added.

A lot of funders can be turned off by such an approach, preferring to invest in programs that will grow and replicate, Revell said. But they should be seeking institutionalization, he said. If a funder isn’t intending to make an open-ended commitment to a population, then an NGO must consider when to close — and why it wouldn’t start mulling the issue right away, he added.

A time-bound project multiplies impact and creates a much bigger return on investment by providing staff expertise across a number of initiatives, which could be appealing to funders, argued Oldfield.

While Graham said she initially worried that a short-term injection of money would “go nowhere,” she now credits unspecified funds for the success of The Soapbox Collaborative, which began with a £1 million donation. “If you believe in what you’re working on and where you’re working … you should be working toward being obsolete and making sure partners in-country have a good chance of carrying on the work,” she said.

How to close shop

Setting expectations and preventing dependency were both key throughout The Soapbox Collaborative’s life span. “We tried to work in a way where there was a realistic possibility that beyond the end of our funding pot … managers of facilities knew that whatever we provided was going to end,” Graham said.

Using a community’s assets — such as the budget, resources, and capacity — as design constraints can also help, Byrns said. “If the local government office budget is this [amount] … don’t assume they will have more funds in the future. … Whatever you expect to continue after the project should be something that the office can already take on here and now,” she said.

In particular, WASH NGOs must consider how latrines, boreholes, hand pumps, and other kinds of infrastructure will be maintained and managed after their closure, Byrns added.

WaterSHED began phasing out activities — such as the sales events it used to generate interest in sanitation products — a few years ago to ensure a smoother transition, while also handing them over to government and private sector actors. In communicating with local actors, Revell said, “We’ve been erring on the side of 'you don’t need us anymore.’”

The Soapbox Collaborative took a similar approach, opting to use the term “completion” rather than “closure." “I think it’s important to celebrate completion and think about the way to describe that, for your team in particular,” Graham said. But what hasn't been achieved should also be shared in a final communiqué, she added. “It’s a responsibility to [identify] those gaps you hope others will finish and make sure those gaps get picked up by another group.”

Oldfield, who was also CEO at WASH Advocates, said its goal was to build on the success of Water Advocates and increase the amount of funding and implementation.

“Staff and volunteers should constantly look for ways to bring other leaders and organizations into the work, strengthening their ability to carry on long after the sunset date,” he advised.

Any materials — manuals, toolkits, or guidelines — should remain available to the rest of the WASH sector for that very purpose. With that in mind, an organization should think about a repository for materials from the start, according to Graham.

“Steal our stuff, roll with it, and continue to accelerate progress,” Oldfield said. “Take that, build on it, [and] stand on the shoulders we’ve built here.”

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