General

This year more than 35 countries are reporting on the African sanitation commitments established with the Ngor Declaration. As an IRC associate, in partnership with UNICEF, I have worked with the AMCOW secretariate and partners to establish a new monitoring systems for the Ngor Declaration Commitments, pilot the system in Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal and finally support the baseline monitoring exercise.

IRC has been working with AMCOW and UNICEF in this process since 2016 to design and validate the indicators with African countries for each of the Ngor Commitments. My colleauge Alana Potter wrote about our reflections on the needs of the monitoring system based on the monitoring of eThekwini Declaration.

Soon sub-regional meetings will take place for countries to exchange with peers on their sanitation commitments and the actions they are taking to strengthen the enabling environment for sustainable sanitation in their country. We are now checking each country report, generating report cards and identifying focus areas and mutual strengths among country peers. This should lead into an exciting country dialogue process and culminate this monitoring round next year in February 2019 at the AfricaSan 5 conference.

In 2015 WASHNote initiated a partnership with Wattopia (before: Sustainability Services).  Wattopia aims to effectuate the energy transition in the Dutch built environment by building transition tools. The company works on a sustainable, affordable and attractive living environment and is driven by the challenges formed by the energy transition: moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, aiming to fulfill our commitments to the Paris Agreement.

Wattopia works together with local and regional governments, building companies, housing corporations, knowledge institutes, and suppliers. Wattopia operates at the level of neighborhoods, houses, and components within the houses. Products that were developed by Wattopia recently include the design and development of a quality mark for sustainable housing, an API design for standardization of monitoring energy performance in houses, and an in-depth process design that describes how a district can move away from the use of natural gas.

Since 2015, WASHNote and Wattopia have been innovating research and data infrastructure for market development, research and transition management towards more sustainable futures in WASH and energy. We share staff time, research infrastructure and develop joint concepts around data and sustainable services.