Our Service Delivery Model in Action

About CAWST

CAWST is a Canadian charity and licensed engineering firm, whose vision is a world where people have the

opportunity to succeed because their basic water and sanitation needs have been met.

CAWST’s network of 5,000 clients spans 190 countries, including Water Expertise and Training (WET)

Centre partnership hubs in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Honduras, Lao PDR, Nepal and Zambia. We

have reached 15.4 million people with better water or sanitation since our inception in 2001.

These are encouraging results, but much

remains to be done: half of the world’s

population lives without sustained access to

safe water, basic sanitation and good hygiene

practices. The scope of global water and

sanitation needs is staggering. Tackling the

issue requires an enormous number of trained

sector professionals. Through its global

network of implementing organizations, our

Canadian-based non-profit is making strides

towards filling this need, at a scale beyond what

we could achieve by directly implementing.

Investing in people

We believe that the challenge in addressing the global need for safe water and sanitation is two-fold: access

to appropriate, affordable technologies and the human capacity to implement. Therefore, CAWST uses an

unorthodox approach, focusing on developing the capacity of local organizations. Through education, we

empower these organizations to take independent action to meet their communities' needs. Traditionally,

international development in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector zeroes in on infrastructure.

Without the integration of well-implemented capacity building, however, infrastructure and hardware

solutions are unsustainable, or limited in their effectiveness and ability to reach impact at scale. Capacity

building is an investment in people, rooted in the understanding that education unlocks the potential in

everyone to improve their lives.

Driven by demand

CAWST begins to deliver services in a country when a critical mass of organizations reaches out to us looking

for help, either by directly contacting CAWST staff, through the closest Water Expertise and Training (WET)

Centre partners, or through our online services. They may be at different phases of their project; inquiries

range from implementers who are just getting their feet wet and want to take action but are not sure where

to start, to implementers who have already experienced some success and are looking for support on dealing

with quality issues, nudging household behaviour change, evaluating and demonstrating the effectiveness

of their projects, or scaling up. Often, implementers who reach out to us have witnessed repeated failures

of infrastructure-focused attempts in their communities. They welcome the fresh approach delivered by our

field experts, who begin by listening to understand their challenges.

Leading with training

Once we have confirmed there is

significant demand in the

country, local organizations

participate in an introductory in-

country course, addressing what

they see as their most pressing

need. We initially train as many

organizations and people and as

possible, to maximize the

probability of training natural

community leaders and those

who will take action. Using their

established local credibility and

building on their existing skills,

these influencers will be the most

likely to amplify their learning into fruitfully implemented projects, with the greatest potential for impact

through their community network.

No singular answer

There is no silver bullet technology that is appropriate to every context. Rather than recommending which

technology we think is most appropriate, CAWST’s advisors support clients to discern for themselves what

the most practical, cost-effective, sustainable alternatives are given the local availability of materials, social

factors, environmental and technical factors, as well as past attempts that have failed. We believe that local

people understand the context better than outsiders ever could, and empowered with the necessary

information, can make the best decisions.

For example, earlier this year, one of our global services experts was in the Samburu region of Northern

Kenya, where one of our clients had helped a school to implement some water filters, specially designed for

schools; the school had subsequently received additional filters of a similar type. The filters were working

and yielding good results, but the school needed more of them to cover the volume of water they required.

An organization approached them in an attempt to persuade them to move to a different treatment

alternative, extolling the virtues of its low per-litre cost. Without knowing exactly why, the headmaster was

uneasy about moving to a different technology. However, he did not have the financial skills to articulate

his needs or determine what each alternative would cost over time. He confided in us that he felt intimidated

by the vendor’s aggressive attitude, and asked our technical advisor point blank what he should do.

Instead of telling him what he should do, our technical advisor helped him figure out what he wanted to do.

The client said he was happy with the filters and they were working great, he just wanted more filters to

fulfill his school’s daily need for 600 litres of safe water. His barrier was that he lacked the financial literacy

to determine the long-term cost of each alternative so he could compare them. He wanted to choose the

most cost-effective solution and be able to explain his choice to funders. We walked with him, showing him

how to find the most cost-effective solution by calculating what each solution cost per litre, how many litres

the school needed, and how to project these costs over time. This built his capacity and his self-confidence;

equipped with new knowledge, in addition to the knowledge he already had, our client was able to articulate

and substantiate his needs to funders, and has just received funding for the additional filters he needed to

provide safe water on an ongoing basis to his school.

Peggy Chikombola, Community Health Promoter, Zambia

An organic process of ongoing support

Our capacity building and consulting process is organic, because it is demand-driven and flexible in adapting

to clients’ needs and context over time. After the initial training, we identify and continue to support those

that are taking action. Although the non-linear process can look different each time, we have done it enough

times to be sure that it will result in action – projects that provide safe water and sanitation in communities

of need. We just don’t know at the onset who will emerge as leading implementers, and the extent of their

future impact in their communities.

We use this approach because it maximizes impact, by training, supporting and mentoring individuals who

go on to lead entire communities to achieve safe water and sanitation. One such young man from Honduras

began his journey with scarce financial resources, but an abundance of grit. Arlen Mejía had to stop going

to school when he was 12, to start working on his parents’ farm. Determined to pursue an education, when

he turned 18 he studied on weekends in a nearby town and rode 2 hours a day on his bike to get to class

after work. He managed to finish middle school and high school, and then took a 6-month course in

community health promotion.

We first met Arlen in 2010, when he assisted

CAWST in delivering a biosand filter

workshop in Honduras. As a recently hired

community health worker at Agua Pura Para

el Mundo (APPM), he had previously trained

end users about the links between water,

sanitation and health, how to use and

maintain the technologies that APPM had

introduced and the simple changes

households could make to improve their

health. This workshop was his first experience

training other organizations, not end users. It

was also Arlen’s first exposure to the science

behind biosand filters and CAWST’s

participatory training style, opening a door to

new practical skills in water and sanitation,

and active learning techniques. He emerged

from the workshop with an action plan,

determined to pursue the know-how he

would need to deliver effective training to

other organizations. A few years later, Arlen

has become a veteran trainer, proficient in

delivering and planning lessons that are used

by trainers around the world. He is a Field

Supervisor at APPM, an organization that

became a CAWST WET Centre in 2014. As a

result of projects implemented by this WET

Centre’s clients, 90,000 people in Honduras

have achieved improved water or sanitation.

Arlen Mejía, Field Supervisor at APPM Honduras

The challenge is bigger than hardware

Successful implementation is a complex endeavour. After taking the initial training, clients emerge with a

well-developed action plan. As implementers begin to execute their action plan, however, there comes a

stage when they realize that their issue is bigger than just hardware: clients face many barriers, including

social and cultural aspects of behaviour change, developing the skills to access funding, and technical

challenges. They may need further training, such as community health promotion, to achieve their

objectives. It is critical to remain connected with clients to help them overcome these challenges in their

early stages, to preserve their confidence in their ability to implement, and the potential of what

they’ve learned to address local water and sanitation needs. Clients need us to be available for the long

haul, to provide ongoing consulting support, so they can overcome barriers and improve or grow their

WASH projects.

Our ten-year relationships working in Uganda were ignited with an organization called Water God’s Way.

After taking a Biosand Filter workshop in Calgary in 2005, one person from WGW went back to implement

in Uganda. He ran into technical issues and reached out to us for help to identify problems and find

solutions. Over the course of these conversations, we developed a relationship with the client. At their

request, we traveled to Uganda to provide consulting support and deliver workshops, in which we included

other local organizations. A similar relationship developed with those other organizations, such as

Connect Africa. In collaboration with our WET Centre in Zambia, we have worked to build the capacity

of Connect Africa, which operates through several resource centres. Through this capacity building

process, since 2006 Connect Africa has gone on to impact the lives of 32,534 people in Uganda with

improved water and sanitation. Since we began working in Uganda, 177,958 people have been reached

with better water or sanitation as a results of projects implemented by CAWST clients.

Country profile: India

CAWST began delivering services in India in 2004 in response to demand from an Indian organization

working to restore traditional water sources that needed a way to make those water sources safe for

drinking. India has been a priority country for CAWST since 2005, given the vast need there and the

number of active water and sanitation organizations requesting our services. In the first few years,

CAWST’s services consisted primarily of workshops and ongoing support for household water treatment

and community health promotion. Due to those services, several CAWST clients implemented large

biosand filter projects over the

years. More recently, our clients

in India have begun requesting

training in sanitation, along with

ongoing demand for household

water treatment and community

health promotion workshops and

consulting support. This is

significant, as more than half of

people without access to proper

sanitation live in India. There is

currently demand for CAWST to

build the capacity of Indian

organizations to deliver training

themselves, including CAWST’s

participation in creating a capacity building platform for decentralized sanitation, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Site visit to a fecal sludge management plant in India

India Results: 2004 to 2015

# of implementing client organizations 35 (9 currently implementing & reporting

results to us)

# of people using water and sanitation

technologies from implementing clients 307,908

# of downloads of CAWST’s WASH resources

from Indian clients 5,949

The story is different in every country; a variety of organizations (NGOs, government, community-based

organizations) implement different technologies using different approaches. Whatever the difference in

each country, the results are:

A significant number of people with safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene

Local organizations with the capacity to serve their communities and be resilient in the face of

changing conditions

Households with increased knowledge of the links between water, sanitation and health and the

simple solutions they can do themselves