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.
Increasing repair and maintenance funds leads to higher borehole functionality and water access rates in the drought-prone regions of Turkana, Kenya... Read more...
Successful pathways secured uptake by government and had flexible programming. Read more...
More emphasis is needed on building and strengthening the work of multi-stakeholder platforms in WASH at the national level. Read more...
Inspirational stories about how ordinary women in India and Kenya have converted the challenges posed by COVID-19 into an opportunity to promote good... Read more...
This study confirms the high relevance of payment modalities that reduce the barrier of the upfront payment to get access to a water supply service... Read more...
Presentations from the WASH Learning Theme 3 - "Water resource management : finding systemic solutions" session of the All Systems Connect... Read more...
Presentations from the WASH Learning theme 1 - Delivering Safe WASH Services session of the All Systems Connect International Symposium 2023. Read more...
The SMART market-based approach is contributing to SDG 6 and beyond. Its impact is significant, but localised. Read more...
Multi-stakeholder engagement is critical for making progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 'Ensure access to water and sanitation for... Read more...
Recording of a webinar on lessons learned after nearly four years of intensive research on the use of collective action in WASH by the USAID-... Read more...
How CSOs in Bangladesh, India, Kenya and elsewhere have collaborated to understand funding flows and key moments for budget decision-making, and... Read more...
Successful sanitation approaches were characterized by their adaptation to the local context, community participation, built-in mechanisms that... Read more...
Challenges and lessons learnt for evidence-based sanitation advocacy for CSOs in Kenya. Read more...
Sharing a sanitation facility with just one to two other households can increase the risk of moderate-to-severe diarrhea (MSD) in young children,... Read more...
This brief summarises recent data on budget allocations to sanitation in four African municipalities. Read more...
Triple-S has successfully promoted sustainability and the Service Delivery Approach (SDA) at the international level and in target countries. The... Read more...
Emerging lessons from the use of building blocks for sustainable un-sewered urban sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa. Read more...
Next week, the Dutch parliament will discuss the multi-annual collaboration plans for its bilateral development cooperation with some 15 partner countries. This could be a pretty dull and technical affair, were it not for the fact that these plans give an interesting insight into what the end of... Read more...