What is your favourite thing about your job you were/are working on? What have been the most challenging features of this project and its process?
I've been the Deputy Director of the DRC WASH Consortium, a consortium of five INGOs led by Concern Worldwide and funded by UK Aid, for about a year. The project assists with rural water, sanitation and hygiene for about 700 villages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
What I like of this job is that we work at scale and we have a tangible impact on the national WASH sector. The Consortium applies a simplified version of the life-cycle costs approach to water management, which I'm also quite of a fan of. On top of the field-based activities, there is a whole range of research, learning and dissemination we carry out.
The general challenge we face is to consistently deliver at the right quality and quantity - in other words, ensuring appropriate quality at the same time keeping the pace of the project milestones and targets. Doing so in a complicated country like DRC (a vast and fragile state with very poor infrastructure and recurring crises) is a challenge as such. In addition, coordinating a consortium means you tap the expertise of many great INGOs, but you also face challenges of alignment, standardisation and replication across the consortium members.