Outside the comfort zone? Lessons learnt from the early stages of a large-scale WOP programme

For many decades, the water sector has been coping with uneven capacities worldwide. This is reflected by the slow progress in achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 6 by 2030; in fact, the overall rate of progress will need to increase six-fold to meet the SDG global target (UNICEF and WHO, 2023). Capacity development has been identified by UN-Water as an SDG 6 Accelerator, capable of speeding up the attainment of these water goals. Capacity development has been defined as the process by which people, organizations and society as a whole unleash, strengthen, create, adapt and maintain capacity over time (OECD-DAC 2006). Within the realm of capacity development, knowledge management is a conscious strategy aimed at getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time and helping people share and put information into action in ways that strive to improve organizational performance (SDC, 2006). Within any given sector, knowledge and capacity can be conceived and addressed at four different levels: individuals, organizations, sector institutions and the ‘enabling environment’ and civil society (Wehn de Montalvo & Alaerts 2013).

The focus of this study was to understand the first, start-up phase of capacity strengthening in WOPs. This means we focused on the partnership formulation, the baseline assessment, the partnership practices and the methods used in capacity building and training that are influencing how knowledge is being shared. This understanding is based on the experiences and lessons learnt during the first year of a large-scale WOP programme financed by the European Commission (EU-WOP) and managed by GWOPA UN-Habitat. The lessons learnt from this study may be instrumental for WOP implementers and funders to make capacity development more effective and impactful in future WOPs by facilitating the set-up of WOP projects. The study also has limitations as the actual capacity strengthening activities, and WOP project outputs are not assessed. Moreover, the article does not focus on the actual operational processes that strengthen capacity. Finally, the article is based on a relatively large number of diverse projects that are characterized by different contexts, reasons for being established and processes of development. The results presented largely ignore these specificities as that would require an elaboration beyond the scope of the article.

In early 2022, GWOPA launched the EU-WOP programme, a €9 million initiative funded by the European Commission. The programme sponsors 22 WOPs created by water and sanitation utilities from African, Arab, Asian, European and Latin American countries (GWOPA 2023). This study collected information on how the start of capacity-building activities can be influenced by the conditions present before and in the early stages of a WOP, and on what capacity-building and training approaches and tools were adopted in the various WOP projects. The study took place in the first half of 2023. Fifty interviews were conducted with a total of 47¹ representatives from the lead, beneficiary and additional partners. Eighteen of the 22 EU-WOP projects were included in the study. All 22 project leaders were contacted via email asking to appoint one representative per partner organization. All those that responded were included in the study. Interviews were arranged on a one-to-one basis and a consent form was shared with interviewees together with the calendar invitation. An interview guide was developed for the semi-structured interviews. Interviewees had the option to give signed consent before the interview or provide verbal consent at the very beginning of the interview.

Factors that emerged as having an impact on the start-up phase of the partnerships include whether the partnership is new or builds on previous collaborations, the presence of a WOP facilitator, the commitment of the top managers of the beneficiary utility towards the capacity development programme, the ownership of learning in the hands of staff at all levels in the beneficiary utility, transparency among partners, a suitable political environment in the country of the beneficiary utility and, if possible, the availability of funds for implementing improvements.

The nature of a partnership has been found to influence the start-up phase of the WOP project. New WOPs experienced delays in performing the needs assessment and, generally speaking, in understanding what each partner wanted to achieve with the project. Partners that had already worked together in a WOP, or another type of collaborative project, were able to start up more easily, as the partners had already performed the needs assessment before writing the partnership project proposal and were able to better understand each other. For example, the ‘needs assessment was already done under the previous WOP; then the lead partner which is new to the WOP carried out their own needs assessment.’ (Additional partner – C4). Any work produced during studies or diagnoses conducted ahead of the WOP may be instrumental to start up a new partnership focused on capacity development: ‘in a previous project, we had a consultant working with us to establish our weaknesses and provide solutions. We used it for this call.’ (Beneficiary partner – A2). In general, ‘mutual appreciation and knowing the challenges that the other utility is facing ensures a smooth process’ was the comment of a lead partner (O1).

Another element that enabled a smooth project start-up phase was the presence of a facilitator as a member of the partnership. Institutions such as NGOs (e.g., WaterAid) or WOP platforms (e.g., WaterLinks) act as WOP facilitators by supporting the utilities with all the typical processes of a partnership, namely supporting with matchmaking, guiding utilities in conducting the needs assessment of the beneficiary partner and by releasing all the other partners from a heavy administrative workload. This was found to be particularly helpful for water utilities that were not familiar with WOPs or that did not have ready in-house capacity (either because of a lack of human resources or a lack of experience) to manage, monitor and report on this kind of collaborative project.

The concept of capacity strengthening seems not to be always clear for beneficiary utilities, especially in new partnerships. Partners may initially fail to distinguish the nature of a WOPs from that of a technical assistance consultancy project. As one respondent noted: ‘most of the people do not understand the concept of capacity building. They would like to have the work done by us and not do it themselves. Before starting with implementation, I tried to raise awareness among the partners in terms of capacity building [ …. ]’ (Lead partner – G1). In any case, aligned with the existing literature (e.g., UNESCO-IHE and GWOPA 2014), practitioners call for the ownership of the learning process to be in the hands of the beneficiary partner: ‘the interrogation and the analysis of the mentee's own operations can be done by the mentee.’ (Lead partner – H1).

Ultimately, water provisioning is strongly dependent on the infrastructure used to abstract, treat and distribute water. This emphasis on infrastructure also implies challenges for a partnership that is geared towards capacity strengthening. The availability of funds for implementing infrastructure changes is perceived to be a limiting factor for actual performance improvement (E2 and E3). This is because there is the perception that the learnings cannot be immediately applied in daily operations without accompanying hardware. WOPs that run in parallel to large infrastructural development projects and that could readily sponsor improvements may appear more attractive for the mentee utilities. In this regard, an additional partner (C4) said: ‘EU-WOP does not have so much budget to be invested on infrastructure. This difference in interest between the EU-WOP programme and the mentee utility can impact the planning.’ Therefore, ‘we need to keep on adjusting our action plan to maintain it relevant, in order to make [the WOP] function.’ (Lead partner – I1).

Although engagement and ownership of the WOP were demanded of the beneficiary partners by the EU-WOP programme, the diverging expectations in relation to the investment funds suggest that this engagement may have been incomplete. A more complete engagement would have helped both partners focus on the capacity development elements that could be achieved without large-scale investments, which were not fundable through the EU-WOP programme.

The assessment of the baseline knowledge and challenges experienced by the beneficiary utility is an important step in the development of WOPs. It emerged that the modality of implementing the needs assessment (one stage versus two stages) can make a difference. A joint assessment of the beneficiary utility at the onset of the partnership and the choice of modality used to select the working areas to be improved were explicitly mentioned.

The assessment of the baseline knowledge in the mentee utility is generally conducted via a needs assessment. Most of the projects interviewed conducted the needs assessment in two stages: the first took place while writing the project proposal and the second at the beginning of the project. As highlighted by one project leader (S1), ‘we have to further do a diagnostic to understand the issues and problems that were highlighted in the earlier agreement.’ The needs assessment was successfully conducted remotely in some cases, where a well-structured approach consisting of questionnaires per working areas and online meetings was adopted. Conversely, in other cases, it was completely impossible to perform the needs assessment online due to communication issues (e.g., language and framing the needs). The impact of the needs assessment process can be already appreciated in some cases; a beneficiary partner (I2) was very clear on the knowledge gained by saying that ‘before for us it was difficult to assess our needs, but now we learned how to do it.’

One crucial element for a comprehensive needs assessment was deemed to be the implementation of a field mission carried out ahead of the proposal submission. ‘Meeting in person is the best way to communicate the problems and understand the needs.’ (Additional partner – R3). Some interviewees were affected by travel restrictions and could not implement them. Others did not travel because there was no budget available for a field mission before the project was officially awarded: ‘it would have been ideal for us to travel for the needs assessment, but there was no money upfront to travel. If any WOP should be done, there should be money for the initial phase.’ (Additional partner – S3). Analogously, one WOP partner recognized that ‘it would be better to have a face-to-face mission. Maybe a suggestion would be to make a workshop to highlight the needs assessment together, it would be better.’ (Additional partner – N3). In one instance (A1), it was noted that the working area led by a person who was unable to attend the field mission lagging behind the others by not meeting all the knowledge exchange targets set for that specific working area. Lastly, a small fraction of interviewees went above and beyond by self-funding this kind of mission and reported drawing benefits from it.

The prioritization of focus areas to be tackled during the WOP is often driven by staff and budget availability. It can be difficult to find personnel to work in the WOP (B1), prioritization can be done based on the availability of young staff (C2) or, simply, the budget defines how extensive the support is (D3). However, some WOP implementers prioritize working areas based on what can yield the highest impact (H1, R5). In particular, one of these interviewees suggested to ‘focus in the area in which you will realize the most gains as a water utility. This discussion should be held before the needs assessment, such that when you go for the detailed needs assessment, you are focusing on the areas roughly highlighted as the priority areas.’ (Lead partner – H1). Overall, the plans that originate from the needs assessment have been recommended to be flexible (D2, F1) in order to accommodate changes during the course of the project implementation.

Important components of the partnering practice emerged to be: top-level commitment, clarity on roles, responsibilities and (technical) language used, and the willingness to overcome perceived cultural differences via open dialogue and transparency.

Top-level commitment, particularly in the beneficiary utility, is a crucial enabler of a successful capacity development process. ‘Management commitment was very much required, so they were with us in the needs assessment process’ (Beneficiary partner – D2). Top-level commitment is also linked to the power of implementing changes during project implementation. One of the projects, for instance, was facing issues due to the inability of one of the partners to make decisions: ‘only the regional branch […] is in the project. They are not independent. So, they cannot really decide what to do [in the city] without involving the national agency. We are trying to fill the gap’ (Lead partner – F1). Moreover, staff turnover at the top level has been creating issues with the implementation of capacity development-related activities, simply because priorities shifted elsewhere (G1).

Nurturing relationships can have an impact on effectively engaging in capacity development processes. In a triangular partnership, the difference in the way the two co-mentors approach top management in the beneficiary utility emerged: ‘Dutch people have tendency to immediately start, rather than building the relationship. My partners in Ghana are much better building the relationship and getting to know each other. They are observing all the protocols: get the commitment from the top is very important.’ (Additional partner – O3).

There are some aspects that need careful clarification at the beginning of a WOP project: roles and responsibilities and technical terminology used by all parties. It highlighted the importance of periodically revisiting the roles and responsibilities of each member of the partnership, as testified by a co-mentor (R3): ‘the split of the responsibilities was clear, but one thing is the written content; in practice there are grey areas where the responsibilities need to be clarified.’

The greatest barriers affecting knowledge sharing in WOPs were deemed to be different languages and terminologies used by beneficiary and mentor utilities (A1, C2, F3, I2, L1, N1, N2, Q2, Q3, R2, S3). Zeroing in on terminology was seen as a crucial step ahead of planning for and implementing capacity building-related activities. ‘Big shock was on the use of terminology. […] There was a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding and this should be in the back of our mind also for other WOPs. We need to clarify upfront. Even terms like wastewater and grey water created misunderstandings.’ (Additional partner – R4). Other WOPs highlight the need to put effort into communication in order to ensure that all partners are on the same page, e.g., ‘we need to say if we do not understand or are clear about something.’ (Beneficiary partner – E2).

Seven interviewees mentioned that they felt very similar to their WOP partners, whereas 16 noted the existence of cultural differences. These differences relate to language, rhythms, mentality, ways of working, presence at meetings and timeliness in responding to emails, among others. It is interesting to note that differences were also highlighted in south–south WOPs, e.g., ‘there is a culture within the city and then there is rural culture; and that is a bigger challenge when you are trying to establish a water utility’ (Additional partner – M1). Other challenges include the slow uptake of information that a lead partner (H1) attributed to the hierarchal style of management in the water operator. This hierarchical style of management led to delays as all decisions needed to be run by the managing director (L1). Engagement in training has proved challenging to understand a lead partner (A1) because partners use a different approach: rather than interrupting and asking questions, they note down all the questions and ask when the trainer stops speaking. The same interviewee pointed out how hierarchy is affecting their WOP as well because junior staff do not dare to speak in meetings when their superiors are in attendance. Lastly, differences can be observed in the preferred communication methods, e.g., ‘they do not use so much emails, but they use WhatsApp groups’ (Lead partner – D1).

Several respondents reported efforts to bridge cultural differences by holding an open dialogue among partners: ‘sometimes we discuss these differences, we have meetings to discuss project progress, but also this kind of questions’ (Lead partner – D1).

The results from the interviews presented above pinpoint a number of interesting issues. A recurrent one is the need for partners to learn how to work together. Partnerships that build on previous experience of working together were seen as more effective in this start-up phase. The suggestion is that knowledge of each other's water systems, working modalities, culture and language, as well as trust built through prior partnership experience can give partners a head-start in any new WOP activity. Engagement and continuity were also identified as key processes for effective partnerships in the public health sector (Fynn et al. 2022). The implication is that it could be worthwhile for water utilities (and donors) to invest in partnerships that develop over a long period of time. Long-term commitment (5–10 years) would then be preferred over relatively short (2–3 years) WOP projects. Linked to the duration of WOP is also the commitment of top-level management, which most respondents viewed as crucial. Without such top-level commitment, it seems virtually impossible for a long-term partnership to develop, as echoed by the review conducted by Porter & Birdi (2018) in the field of water innovation.

A second issue that arises from the study is that engaging in a WOP is clearly different from the day-to-day work of operating a water utility. Engaging with a partner and solidifying a partnership require skills that often go beyond the normal scope required by water operator staff. For water operators to engage in successful partnerships, they need to develop skills more associated with development NGOs and less with the technical day-to-day of water operators. This is aligned with Mollinga (2008) who identified different ‘domains of interaction’ in water politics. Each domain is characterized by different actors and issues. As stated by OECD (2006), partnership performance and stability depend on inputs, skills, and experience of who is managing the partnership. This gap can partially be addressed by engaging additional partners to help facilitate the partnership, taking on roles such as proposal writing, logistics management and partnership monitoring that a utility is not typically staffed to take on. But it also demands that staff involved in the partnership learn how to partner, particularly if the partner is from another continent. The skill sets that need to be developed appear to relate to a variety of dimensions. The staff of water operators needs to learn to become trainers and coaches. The staff of beneficiary utilities needs to understand and adopt the concept of capacity strengthening (rather than viewing partners as consultants). All partners involved need to understand the administrative requirements of working in the international development sector.

The interview responses suggest that WOP projects essentially revolve around finding a balance between a variety of trade-offs. The trade-offs largely revolve around the identification of priorities, the limitations of resources that the partners can invest and the activities that they consider most impactful. For staff of water utilities, engagement in a WOP is usually not their main work focus. This means that engaging in a WOP aimed at capacity strengthening takes place in addition to regular work activities (Mahanta 2023). Moreover, funding for WOPs is usually limited.

The water supply sector is such that without investment in infrastructure, significant performance improvements are unlikely. This means that capacity strengthening needs to be embedded within the (investment) strategy and priorities of the beneficiary utilities. Without such linkages, the interviews suggest that the partnership may suffer from two undesirable consequences. The first concerns a lack of ownership, in which the beneficiary utility essentially approaches the partnership as a technical assistance consultancy project. In this approach, the focus on enhanced capacity as a lasting impact of the WOP project is largely lost. The second consequence concerns the expectations of the beneficiary utility. If the WOP project is insufficiently embedded within the beneficiary utility, there is the possibility that expectations exist that the WOP project cannot fulfil. The WOP projects under the EU-WOP programme have only limited investment opportunities. This means that it is undesirable to approach WOP projects as stand-alone endeavours.

As highlighted above, WOPs are very much about finding a balance between priorities, resources and activities that work. The interviews suggest that although benefits can be considerable when that balance is successfully found, it does require considerable effort and reflection to find this balance. Water operators have been established as organizations that develop, operate and maintain infrastructure for the abstraction, treatment and distribution of water. This is both what employees of water operators have been educated to do and what their regular job is all about.

In WOP projects, these employees are expected to profile a very different skill set. They need to be able to understand and work with different cultures. They require an understanding of working in a partnership (rather than a contractual relationship) with external parties. They need to deal with the requirements of the international development sector. They need to get an understanding of the potential and limitations of capacity strengthening in a water utility. They need to become trainers and coaches. For the staff of an organization to acquire this new skill set, it is not an easy task.

During the interviews, the role of external facilitators was also highlighted by a few respondents as having a beneficial impact on the partnership. These facilitators do not necessarily focus on the capacity strengthening activities but rather facilitate the set-up of the WOP, assist in the communications with actors in the international development community and guide the partnering process. In short, they are filling the international development skills gap that is somewhat missing in water operators. As a recommendation, we suggest a further exploration of facilitation as a means to smoothen and accelerate the set-up of the WOP project. Broader partnerships that go beyond peer-to-peer, in which different partners focus on their strength (i.e., the water operators on operations and the facilitators on partnership management), could be beneficial. However, in doing so, we do acknowledge possible concerns pertaining to facilitation (such as the possibility that it decreases the ownership of the partners of the WOP).

All relevant data are included in the paper or its Supplementary Information.

The authors declare there is no conflict.