Catarina Fonseca is trained as an economist and has a doctoral degree in water sciences. She has over twenty-three years of experience in development cooperation and non-profits of which twenty in the water and sanitation sector. She has pioneered sector development on the understanding of life-cycle costs and financing. She was the WASHCost Director (2008-2013), a large-scale initiative to identify the long-term costs of sustaining rural and peri-urban water and sanitation services. She has been part of the IRC management team and managed the International and Innovation programme from 2012-2019.
Catarina Fonseca was the Director of Watershed, a 5-year strategic programme that run from 2016-2020 to strengthen the ability of citizens to hold governments and service providers accountable for the services they deliver. She is an Associate of IRC and is available for consultancy assignments. Over the past 20 years she has trained, assessed, evaluated and provided technical support to over 50 clients. Since 2019 she has her own company, Pulsing Tide.
Recommendations for the shareholders of national PDBs: states and governments. 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...
This Research Review provides an overview of subsidy targeting strategies and the conditions under which they have proven successful or not, drawing... Read more...
Highlighting financial and technical collaborative successes. Read more...
Guidelines for European national and subnational policy-makers responsible for sustainable financing of small-scale water and sanitation services,... Read more...
What is needed to eliminate inequalities and achieve universal access to sanitation? Read more...
10 things IRC, Water.org and the World Bank think you need to know about the enabling environment for finance in WASH Read more...
Listen to this podcast with Catarina Fonseca of IRC on how WASH systems strengthening can help address the financing gap in the WASH sector. Read more...
Find out in this podcast with Catarina Fonseca of IRC why she refers to finance as the unavoidable building block and which two key costs are... Read more...
Though mobile money penetration is high (72%), using mobile money for water bill payments is not top of mind and would require additional awareness... Read more...
This presentation provides a simplified definition and framework for blended finance, together with emerging themes and statistics for the water,... Read more...
Without an improved asset maintenance, system it is likely that rural water systems in Ghana will continue to provide unsustainable services. Read more...
This Conference Perspective was co-authored by Patrick Moriarty for the OECD – GIZ Conference: Closing the gap for water in line with SDG ambitions: the role of blended finance, 4-5 October 2018, Eschborn, Germany. Read more...
A podcast about empowering civil society with transparency tools to aid in the fight against lagging WASH budgets. Read more...
Existing models used for financing water infrastructure development do not seem very applicable to the realities of small towns. Read more...
An interview with IRC's Head International Programme Catarina Fonseca on increasing water sector financing by improving governance. Read more...
All eyes are now on blended finance, but there are real challenges to using it in practice. Read more...