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.
Despite reduced funding for market systems development (MSD) in sanitation, Water For People (WFP) has been able to grow and expand its approach. Read more...
Sanitation criteria under the Model Healthy Village Program would best be harmonized with the Ministry of Health's Guideline for Open Defecation Free... Read more...
Recommendations to accelerate progress towards achieving Open Defecation Free (ODF) status by 2030 and the progress made up to January 2021. Read more...
Decentralized Provincial Community Participation and Education (PEC) was found to be the most cost-effective modality, with significant potential for... Read more...
WSUP's Sam Drabble shares his experiences with measuring urban sanitation systems. 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 2 - "Markets and behaviour change : how people invest and driving to scale" session of the All Systems... 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 Transform WASH Activity in Ethiopia has significantly contributed to advancing market-based sanitation approaches and promoting gender equality... Read more...
This paper presents IRC Ghana's experience of acting as a 'hub' to support collective action in the Asutifi North District of Ghana. Read more...
Guidance and tools for designing, developing, planning, implementing and monitoring and evaluation of a market-based sanitation approach and related... Read more...
Successful sanitation approaches were characterized by their adaptation to the local context, community participation, built-in mechanisms that... Read more...
Using systems thinking principles, this report explores how on-site sanitation services can be improved in Lusaka, Zambia, and Maputo, Mozambique. Read more...
Improvements in sanitation access played a substantial role in increasing average child height. Read more...
An approach is developed to assess WASH risks in marginal populations that are poorly understood and served through conventional approaches. Read more...
Ten years after a community-led total sanitation campaign, intervention households continued to have higher rates of ever owning a latrine but... Read more...
A call for commitment, transformative thinking, engagement, integration and disaggregated data production. Read more...
Challenges and lessons learnt for evidence-based sanitation advocacy for CSOs in Kenya. Read more...
This paper examines methodological options for calculating a 'total service gap', a measure that would combine data on each rung of the service... Read more...