Co-director | Growth Hub
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Stef Smits is a senior programme officer and Co-director of IRC's Growth Hub. He has 20 years of professional experience in water supply and sanitation in over 25 countries in Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, and South Asia. His main thematic expertise includes: institutional models for water supply, sustainability and enabling environment, monitoring, costing and financing of services and integrated water resources management.
Stef has led numerous projects on these topics, and published about them. In addition, he has ample management expertise: from consultancy assignments to multi-annual programmes, and units within an organisation. He has worked for a range of clients including bilateral donors, development banks, research funders and NGOs. Stef holds an MSc degree in Irrigation and Water Engineering from Wageningen University, The Netherlands.
Territorial approaches to rural water supply were a hot topic at this week's Triple-S annual meeting. Read more...
Email requests can sometimes trigger the most interesting thoughts and ideas. Read more...
How should WASH-related targets make it into the United Nation's post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals? Read more...
It would be easy, and wrong, to say that global conferences rarely deliver results, for sometimes they offer brand new ways of seeing things. Read more...
Navigating the danger zone where countries raise enough money to build but not maintain new infrastructure raises a question: Does this zone exist? Read more...
Elder Joe is the proud secretary of a water committee managing a handpump on the outskirts of Odumase town in Ghana. But the committee would rather manage a different type of system. Read more...
The costs of getting spare parts for handpumps can sometimes be higher than the costs of the parts. But a new SMS-based system might help. Read more...
I cannot resist visiting the odd water works or taking photographs of the local water and sanitation facilities during my holidays. Read more...
114 proyectos de agua financiados por 11 programas diferentes y a través de 19 modalidades de trabajo. Read more...
Stef Smits reflexione sobre los resultados del análisis del costo del ciclo de vida en Honduras. Read more...
Jacques Dutronc's song sums up how the WASH sector is waking up to the Paris Declaration, cleaning up the mess of often uncoordinated aid efforts. Read more...
So said Luis Romero of CONASA (the Honduran water and sanitation policy-making body), in response to the graphs below. Read more...
El verdadero problema no radica tanto en la cantidad de donantes sino en lograr que todos ellos siguen los mismos enfoques – o al menos similares – y que estos se integran a los desarrollados por el gobierno. Read more...
Sagar is an island at the mouth of the river Ganges where it meets the Bay of Bengal. Every year in January, about half a million pilgrims visit the island to worship at the holy Ganges. The hundreds of mobile toilet units standing on the empty festival terrain during the rest of the year are... Read more...
Over the past year, there has been quite a bit of buzz in the WASH sector on the sustainability clause that DGIS seeks to include in its contacts with implementers. The pros and cons of this have been widely debated . A key component of the clauses is to have sustainability checks as a way to... Read more...
Anyone who works in the water sector cannot have missed the consultations and debates on the post-2015 goals for water and sanitation. Read more...
This story is fictional. Any resemblance to real situations or persons is pure coincidence. When Alice stepped through the mirroring water surface into waterland, the first creature she came across was a rabbit, wearing a UN-blue jacket, looking frantically at its watch. "It is nearly time. Only... Read more...
A few weeks ago, an interesting email discussion was held on “water point mapping” D-Groupof the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN). Part of the discussion focused on how much it costs to map or monitor all water systems in a country. Various figures were floating around in the discussion. But when... Read more...
Two weeks ago, the “management and support” working group of the RWSN had its first meeting. This meeting focused specifically on management models and support arrangements for piped water supply in small towns. Read more...
Driven amongst others by the mobile phone applications, more and more statistics are becoming available on the state of water services. These go well beyond the coverage data we were used to in the JMP reports (and which this year gave us some reason to be mildly optimistic). The new stats provide... Read more...
