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.
Financial monitoring will be useful only if governments lead in setting the service-level standards they want to deliver to citizens. Read more...
Best practices, challenges and recommendations on the use of UNICEF's Value for Money (VFM) tool and other VFM metrics. Read more...
Guidelines for European national and subnational policy-makers responsible for sustainable financing of small-scale water and sanitation services,... 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 manual provides practical guidance to facilitate and standardise the implementation of social life-cycle costing to "improved" drinking-water... Read more...
The report provides insights on the cost of providing water in emergency situations using two camps as case studies. The life-cycle costs approach... Read more...
It costs at least US$ 10 per student to construct water and sanitation facilities in schools and another US$ 1.40 per student per year for all recurrent costs including continuous support to hygiene promotion. Read more...
This report, commissioned by UNHCR, presents a methodology to cost water services in post-emergency situations as well as in first emergency... Read more...
Even the extreme poor can and do pay for improved water and sanitation services, especially if they can save time collecting water. For sanitation,... Read more...
What happens when people cannot pay for water and sanitation services? Mostly, we hear about women and girls in low income countries and how they access polluted water from ponds, rivers or hand dug wells. This week, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (USA) made it to international news for... Read more...
This twenty minute feature film looks into the sustainability issues of rural and peri-urban water, sanitation and hygiene services Read more...
Programme managers and funders want to know the costs for the provision of WASH in schools and how to fund the desired outcomes over at least a 10 year period. Read more...
In Ouagadougou, the WASHCost team found an example of how the water sector could be organized, by looking at existing initiatives using the life-cycle cost approach. Read more...
This paper is about the costs of providing direct and indirect support to rural water service provision and provides an overview of the features such... Read more...