WASHME: Making WASH Orgs Sustainable

The Foundation Center has been collecting collaboration stories for its Nonprofit Collaboration Database, a searchable collection of 670+ profiles that gets 2,000+ visits every month. And this one just came in. (Have a story you'd like to share? Learn more here.)

"Sustainability is one of the most pressing issues facing the WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) sector today. More than 30 percent of WASH projects fail after two to five years." -- Sustainability WASH Web site

In 2011, a group of NGOs, funders, and academics started to ask hard questions about the sustainability of their own programs and those of other organizations in the WASH sector. One result of that effort was Sustainable WASH, an online platform for assessing, learning about, and sharing best practices in the field.

And one initiative of Sustainable WASH is the WASH Monitoring Exchange (WASHME), which was developed by several leading WASH organizations to eliminate barriers to post-construction monitoring in the belief that such monitoring is critical for the ongoing improvement of organizational practice and understanding. Any organization is encouraged to submit data, which will be made publicly available.

The ultimate goal of this work is to create a set of indicators that other WASH organizations can use to measure the sustainability of their own work. Leading partners in the collaboration are:

• Improve International (Atlanta, Georgia)
• Global Water Challenge (Arlington, Virginia)
• Blue Planet Network (Redwood City, California)
• Water 1st International (Seattle, Washington)
• Water For People (Denver, Colorado)

You can read more about the WASHME collaboration in the Nonprofit Collaboration Database.

And for submitting its story to the database, WASHME will receive a free Digital Grant Guide and a 20-percent discount on a full-day course.

How about you? Are you ready to share your collaboration story?

-- Sandy Pon