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.
Wednesday 3 April 2024 Read more...
What we can learn from Ghana Read more...
Het is tijd voor 'nieuwe waterambities'. Read more...
Recommendations to the Dutch government on how to reduce the potential adverse social and environmental impacts of the National Capital Integrated... Read more...
This briefing paper is linked to a study on country-level accountability mechanisms in 25 countries for the implementation of Sustainable Development... Read more...
The King's speech marks the opening of the Dutch parliamentary year. This year he drew attention to the important position of the Netherlands in the international water sector. The budgets that were presented alongside the speech also reflect this, notably with a 6% increase for the budget for WASH... Read more...
Several Dutch water sector organisations have written to Minister Ploumen (Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation) about the Dutch targets for water supply. 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...
Over the past year, there has been quite a bit of buzz in the WASH sector on the sustainability clause that DGIS seeks to include in its contacts with implementers. The pros and cons of this have been widely debated . A key component of the clauses is to have sustainability checks as a way to... Read more...
Driven amongst others by the mobile phone applications, more and more statistics are becoming available on the state of water services. These go well beyond the coverage data we were used to in the JMP reports (and which this year gave us some reason to be mildly optimistic). The new stats provide... Read more...
One of the pillars of the new Dutch development policy is to promote private sector involvement as a motor for economic growth. Read more...
The Netherlands is not the first country to spring to mind when the word drought is mentioned. But we are now in the midst of one, as according to meteorologists it has been the driest spring in decades. Read more...
Covering The Netherlands with collective drinking water supply systems is the outcome of a long history. On the one hand this was driven by technical... Read more...