IRC Associate
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Catarina Fonseca is trained as an economist and has a doctoral degree in water sciences. She has over twenty-three years of experience in development cooperation and non-profits of which twenty in the water and sanitation sector. She has pioneered sector development on the understanding of life-cycle costs and financing. She was the WASHCost Director (2008-2013), a large-scale initiative to identify the long-term costs of sustaining rural and peri-urban water and sanitation services. She has been part of the IRC management team and managed the International and Innovation programme from 2012-2019.
Catarina Fonseca was the Director of Watershed, a 5-year strategic programme that run from 2016-2020 to strengthen the ability of citizens to hold governments and service providers accountable for the services they deliver. She is an Associate of IRC and is available for consultancy assignments. Over the past 28 years she has trained, assessed, evaluated and provided technical support to over 50 clients. Since 2019 she has her own company, Pulsing Tide.
WASHCost has been a bold, global attempt to gain accurate knowledge on disaggregated water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) costs in rural and peri-urban areas. This independent End-of-Project assessment, commissioned by IRC, reflects on the lessons learnt from the project. Read more...
Programme managers and funders want to know the costs for the provision of WASH in schools and how to fund the desired outcomes over at least a 10 year period. Read more...
In Ouagadougou, the WASHCost team found an example of how the water sector could be organized, by looking at existing initiatives using the life-cycle cost approach. Read more...
A short film showing how WASHCost Mozambique calculated the costs of building a traditional latrine. Read more...
In India, 4 billion dollars are annually invested in the rural drinking water sector. Hand pumps, pipes and overhead systems are supplied. But in many villages, sufficient clean drinking water is still far from being an every day reality. Read more...
Judging by the number of posts on Twitter, evidence for decision making seems to be a hot topic at the moment not only in the WASH sector but more broadly in the development realm. Read more...
This working paper provides evidence on current practices around funding capital maintenance and the resulting impact on services. Read more...
The vision for WASH in the post-2015 development agenda is one of universal access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene in our time. No one should practice open defecation. Everyone should have safe water, sanitation and hygiene at home. All schools and health centres should have water,... Read more...
This paper concludes that there is chronic underfunding of rural water services, to meet the costs required to provide and sustain a basic level of... Read more...
On 15 May 2012, Catarina Fonseca presented the life-cycle costs approach as the seventh installment of the World Bank and Rural Water Supply Network’s webinar series on rural water supply. World Bank Rural Water Supply webinar series Read more...
IRC works with associates, international sector specialists who will provide expertise and support...
