Introducing BPD June 2013

Vision

To see unserved and poorly served communities sustainably accessing safe water and sanitation service delivery as a result of effective stakeholder relationships managing water and resource allocations.

Mission

BPD improves safe water and sanitation service delivery in unserved and poorly served communities by reinforcing partnership approaches among users, providers and policymakers and linking upstream use with downstream need. Through all its activities, BPD fosters and facilitates learning to increase sector effectiveness and cross-sector solutions.

WHAT IS BPD?

BPD is a non-profit charity that improves the provision of water and sanitation services in unserved and poorly served communities by ensuring that partnerships are effective and appropriately ambitious.

Known and Trusted Internationally

After more than a decade working with key sector actors, BPD is known and trusted internationally in the water and sanitation sector. Our wide-ranging and in-depth experience enables us to speak with authority.

A Crucial ‘Behind the Scenes’ Role

BPD challenges the sector at all levels through our work with governments, large institutional donors, large water users, service providers, NGOs, leading research institutes, professional and advocacy organisations.

Honestly Reflecting the Challenges of Partnering

By shifting the way in which the sector thinks about partnerships, BPD encourages the incorporation of good governance, accountability and transparency into better policy and practice aimed at more effectively meeting the needs of unserved and poorly served households.

Flexible and Responsive

As a small team, BPD has the flexibility to be creative and responsive to sector needs. With our low proportion of overheads to programme costs, BPD provides excellent value for money.

Strengthening partnerships for improved water and sanitation

service delivery

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“…there have been so many exciting partnerships, sometimes very small and very targeted, sometimes quite large and expansive, but they all had in common a belief that we had to start thinking more creatively about solving problems that affect us all.”

Hillary Clinton, 2013

“..Sustainability requires the development of meaningful partnerships that recognize the diverse roles of all actors, including communities, governments, donors, implementers, and all other stakeholders…”

WASH Sustainability Charter

“Cooperation between actors in different sectors is essential for proper water development and management...”

Stockholm International Water Institute

“Everyone working in water and sanitation is in some sort of relationship… Governments have to deal with people; private companies need to liaise with governments and so on.”

Tracey Keatman, BPD

THE NEED

A Global Water and Sanitation Crisis

People living in poverty often cannot access safe and convenient water and sanitation services, further perpetuating their poverty through poor health and other consequences. Roughly 1 in 7 people in the world live without access to safe water and over a third are still without adequate sanitation.

Why Partnerships?

BPD’s own experience has shown that the challenges of water and sanitation delivery in developing countries are not always technical or financial, but more often revolve around complex institutional relationships between stakeholders. Genuine partnerships are therefore necessary in the water and sanitation sectors. This is because:

No single organisation has control over all the economic, environmental, technical and social factors that affect demand for and supply of water and sanitation services

Organisations may lack sufficient skills, resources and/or authority and benefit from pooling these and sharing risk

Sustainably scaling up services requires a range of stakeholders, including from outside the sector

A complex web of relationships and interests can lead to overlap, incoherence and a lack of accountability

Partnerships provide a means of reaching out to poor communities and ensuring environmental sustainability, particularly when individual service providers are not incentivised to do this alone.

Polluted river in Kibera, Nairobi Collapsing latrine, Mombasa, Kenya

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Partnership Challenges

BPD’s many years of experience researching and working with partnerships in the water sector have shown that they often fail to reach their potential, are difficult to maintain, or even break down. Challenges include:

Mismatched incentives, expectations, objectives, needs or time frames

Poor planning and insufficient contextual analysis, communication and negotiation

Significant power imbalances

Disinterest, inaction and inflexibility

Insufficient resources - especially time - dedicated to partnership processes

Lack of community engagement or inability to connect with a wider set of stakeholders or issues critical to the ultimate success of the initiative

In addition, broader contextual challenges, such as environmental degradation and climate change, global recession, decentralisation of power to local governments, urbanisation and other demographic shifts all impact on the negotiations around resource management and the subsequent delivery of services.

BPD’s Background and the Increasing Complexity of Partnerships

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) were seen by some as a critical solution to water and sanitation challenges. Partnerships have since become increasingly complex and vary in scope and scale (e.g. community, city-wide, national or international; few or multiple stakeholders). They may be mandated by government or emerge as a logical response and may or may not be formalised through contracts or agreements. Partnerships may involve not only service delivery, but also finance, policy-making, regulation, research or advocacy.

BPD was established as an informal initiative in 1998 (as Business Partners for Development) by the World Bank, DFID, multi-national water companies, WaterAid and other NGOs to test and promote a ‘tri-sector’ approach to service delivery, i.e. bringing together the strengths of the public, private and civil society sectors.

BPD has since become independent and expanded in scope. Responding to the changing context, the organisation applies its skills to a wide range of relationships, stakeholders, partnership projects and research topics in a host of different water and sanitation contexts.

Stakeholder Groups

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OUR SOLUTION

How We Work

Since 1998, BPD has responded to constant demand for its unique, independent, innovative non-profit service to the water and sanitation sectors in developing countries. We work at the local, national and international levels directly with policymakers, providers (across the public, private and civil society sectors), advocacy networks, major water users, funders and communities to make partnerships more effective. Our work has enabled unserved and poorly served communities to access more sustainable water and sanitation services.

BPD provides guidance in the design, maintenance and assessment of multi-stakeholder water and sanitation partnerships through three key interrelated activities:

Action research – working with partnership practitioners on the ground, BPD focuses on research themes that inform partnership process more generally as well as those with specific relevance to the water and sanitation sectors, like pro-poor regulation and the role of sanitation entrepreneurs. Emerging learning is documented through printed and online publications.

Direct support – working with partnership initiatives, BPD builds stronger relationships through the application of our tried and tested tools (e.g. contextual analysis, organisational development and governance design, partnership assessment). This support challenges practitioners to think through partnership design and implementation processes to maximise effectiveness through clearer communication, stronger accountability and an emphasis on mutual learning.

Learning events and activities – BPD provides tailored and more generic learning events for individuals and organisations across the water and sanitation sector to share and facilitate learning around partnerships and promote dialogue and networking (e.g. training courses, workshops & discussion days).

Learning and capacity building are particular threads that run through all three of these integrated activities.

Partnership training workshop

Recent BPD Activities and Interests

Current research interests: WASH and the environment, upstream/downstream linkages; WASH in Schools (WinS); small town service delivery; PPP trends, small-scale water and sanitation entrepreneurs; political economy analysis; community engagement; the impact of culture on partnerships, etc.

Direct Project Support: Partnership learning reviews for USAID-Rotary H2O Partnership and USAID-TCCC/TCCAF Water and Development Alliance; stakeholder analysis & learning review for WSUP; Collective Action Guide with Water Futures Partnerships; IDB-supported WASH in Schools evaluation; organisational development with FAN, CONIWAS & WIN; public-public partnership review in Indonesia.

Learning Events & Activities: Intensive, interactive training courses on partnership skills delivered more than a dozen times across Africa for cross-sector groups of policymakers and practitioners; NGO Capacity Needs Assessment tool; numerous workshops, roundtables and seminars at international conferences.

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What People Say about Us

“For such a small organisation, BPD seems to have a great impact… to know the work on the ground, the different stakeholders… and to …link that back to discussions at the international level”.

“BPD’S workshop brought us for the first time to look at the nature of these partnerships and to build a stronger programme. [We have] gone on to receive international recognition for good practice as a regional 'driver of change'.”

“BPD fills a niche in the market addressing issues of what partnership means that no other organisation covers in the same way.”

OUR IMPACT: WHY PARTNER WITH BPD?

A Neutral and Innovative Approach

BPD is the only non-profit organisation solely specialising in improving relationships between partners in the water and sanitation sectors. We are known for developing neutral and objective cutting edge thinking and offering innovative ‘out of the box’ solutions to partnership and institutional issues. BPD has been described as an ‘ideas factory’, ‘dynamic thought leader’ and ‘trend spotter’.

A Highly Experienced and Respected Team

BPD’s knowledgeable and respected team has many years’ experience working on water and sanitation partnerships. Due to the wide range of practitioners and policymakers with whom the team interacts, BPD brings an in-depth insight into the sector with a valuable understanding of both the technical (‘hardware’) and social (‘software’) issues. Our Board of Directors (below) also directly contributes a wealth of experience and influence (see http://www.bpdws.org/web/w/www_15_en.aspx).

Igniting Best Practice and Building Capacity

In addition to working with more than 50 partnerships to date, BPD has supported hundreds of individuals and organisations to work more effectively through our capacity building work. This is weaved through each of our three core activities and extends widely as participants are encouraged to share their learning with others. Our open access document library stocks over 150 widely referenced publications (www.bpdws.org).

Actively Promoting Sustainability

BPD promotes approaches to water and sanitation service delivery that are economically, environmentally, socially and technically viable. By encouraging more robust planning and more open communications, we help partnerships create more sustainable service delivery models.

IDRC environmental research project: Cochabamba, Bolivia Water project evaluated by BPD in Angola

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Examples of BPD’s Key Programmatic Relationships:

AFD (French Government)

AguaConsult

AquaFed

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

DFID (UK Government)

DGIS (Dutch Government)

DWAF (South African Government)

FHI 360

Florida International University WA-WASH

Freshwater Action Network (FAN)

Global Environment and Technology Foundation (GETF)

Ghana Coalition of NGOs in Water & Sanitation (CONIWAS)

GIZ-WWF-SABMiller Water Futures Partnership

Inter-American Development Bank

International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

Rotary International / Foundation

SDC / SECO (Swiss Government)

Suez Environnement

USAID

Veolia Water

WaterAid

Water Integrity Network (WIN)

Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC)

USAID-TCCC/TCCAF Water and Development Alliance

Water for People

World Bank and World Bank Water & Sanitation Program (WSP)

Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP)

BPD’s Current Board of Directors (by Sector)

Civil Society Darren Saywell (Chair) Plan International – USA

Civil Society Allan Cain Development Workshop – Angola

Civil Society Peter Lochery CARE – USA

Civil Society Lajana Manandhar Lumanti – Nepal

Public Manuel Alvarinho CRA – Mozambique

Public Neil Macleod Durban-eThekwini Water – South Africa

Public Abdoul Niang SONES – Senegal

Private Alexandre Brailowsky Suez Environnement – France

Private Atika Doukkali Veolia Water – France

Private Gustavo Heredia Programa Agua Tuya – Bolivia

Private Thomas Van Waeyenberge Aquafed – Belgium

“BPD continues to push the boundaries of our understanding about stakeholder roles and relationships, institutional dynamics and theories of change in our sector – and does so with a

quiet capacity and enthusiasm that is infectious.” Darren Saywell, BPD Board Chairman

BPD Water and Sanitation, 47-49 Durham Street, London, SE11 5JD, UK Tel: +44 (0)20 77934557 | info@bpdws.org | www.bpdws.org |Twitter/ Facebook: BPDWS

Charity Registration No. 1107781 | Company Registration No. 4693224 (E ngland and Wales)