Ken Caplan - Director
M.A. International Development, American University;
B.Sc. Foreign Service, International Relations and Comparative Regional Studies, Georgetown University
Ken Caplan has been Director of Building Partnerships for Development in Water and Sanitation since 2003 and was the Co-ordinator of the original initiative (Business Partners for Development) from 1999. Ken has developed a range of research programmes on, for example, small town water and sanitation services (with WaterAid) and partnership accountability and assessment. These have built on analysis he has conducted of diverse water and sanitation contexts, from water provision through public private partnerships in Buenos Aires and Jakarta, to public toilet provision in Ghana, to a political economy analysis of sanitation services in Brazil (for the World Bank / Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) in conjunction with Oxford Policy Management).
Ken has worked directly with a range of organisations and partnership projects from, for example, local level partnerships between utilities and NGOs in Lilongwe and Blantyre (Malawi), to national level networks such as CONIWAS in Ghana, to more global partnerships and networks including the Water Integrity Network, Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), and Freshwater Action Network. Ken is also a Senior Associate of the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL), serving as tutor on tailored courses for senior officials from the World Bank and other organisations. Ken previously worked for 8 years in Southeast Asia, including rural Thailand, Bangkok and Vietnam.