BPD at AfricaSan+5
This week Durban hosts the AfricaSan+5 Conference, following up five years after the First AfricaSan Conference in 2002 (that helped to establish a Millennium Development Goal (MDG) specifically for sanitation). BPD staff member David Schaub-Jones is there, hearing about Africa's progress towards those MDGs and looking to discuss the contribution that partnership approaches are making across the continent.
In Africa this year BPD is looking to explore ways to make collaboration over school sanitation more effective, the role and contribution of small-scale sanitation providers and the specific challenges of small-town sanitation provision.
If you're keen to discuss this, or BPD's existing body of work on sanitation partnerships, please contact David on davidsj@bpdws.org or on +27 82 400 60 68 during the conference itself (18-20 February).
Sanitation Article Competition Winner!
BPD is proud to announce the winner of its inaugural title competition held in December 2008. Alex Nash, of Atkins in Epsom, England, provided a title for an article dealing with the challenges of rental housing and 'selling sanitation':
"To let or toilet? Is that the question? The hidden challenges of selling sanitation". (339 KB)
He is the proud winner of a £20 book voucher from Amazon - although he is yet to tell us what he is buying with it. A marked-down book of Christmas puns perhaps?
Do contact us if you have ideas of how to take forward work on the themes within the article (to do with sanitation marketing and incentive challenges) as well as recommendations of other work on the topic.
PPP Training Modules
In London on 31 January and 1 February 2008, five training and partnership specialists from CREPA, OECD, IRC, Cap-Net and Streams of Knowledge came together to produce five, separate training modules based on the Tools for Public-Private Partnerships www.partnershipsforwater.net. During the product-oriented workshop, participants discussed appropriate audiences, creative training methods and practical next steps for the tools in the overall enhancement of multi-sector partnerships. BPD hopes to use elements from these modules for further training and peer-learning, and welcomes collaboration with other organisations who work with institutional reform, particularly partnerships among civil society, private, and public sectors. Email Urooj Amjad (urooja@bpdws.org) for further information.
BPD Institution-building Support
BPD is increasingly being asked to provide formal and informal support on how best to govern different national and international networks. Given the different drivers to participate, such networks work under a different set of "rules" than the more implementation-oriented partnerships with which BPD is more familiar. In the coming year, we are hoping to collate guidance notes on structuring such governing bodies. Your own perspectives on what has worked or not worked with regard to how to structure decision-making processes in collaborative arrangements would be most welcomed.
Partnership Brokers Accreditation Scheme
With clear links to BPD's work, The Partnership Brokers Accreditation Scheme (PBAS) offered by the Overseas Development Institute in conjunction with the International Business Leaders Forum is designed to build professionalism and integrity in those at the front end of making cross-sector partnerships for sustainable development work. Recently completing its 14th cohort, the course involves a week-long residential course offering practical training in partnership brokering skills including communication, interest-based negotiation, resource mapping, facilitation, review & evaluation. This is then followed by a 3-month professional practice period which pairs participants with an experienced mentor. Participants are required to complete a final project on a particular partnership area of relevance to them to receive the certification.
To date, more than 250 individuals from all stakeholder groups and many different parts of the world have undertaken this training. Two bursaries are available for the upcoming Cohort 17 with its residential course in the UK, March 2-8 2008. The bursaries each have a value of £1,000 off the usual fee of £3,000. For more information on the bursaries and forthcoming courses (March and June 2008), please refer to: http://www.odi.org.uk/iedg/pbas/index.html
Ashoka's Changemakers Competition
The Global Water Challenge and Ashoka's Changemakers have launched a competition Tapping Local Innovation: Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis in the search for the most innovative approaches to providing access to safe drinking water and sanitation. To enter the competition or make comments on other entries, please see http://changemakers.net/
The deadline for entries is 26 March 2008. The three winning entries will each receive $5,000.
