Read the electronic version

«We need to tap in the think tank of Africa utilities, we need to tap the best people»

The STC meeting has just ended in Djibouti and this time it was held differently With bigger better focus, we have new commission that has been set and put through what we want to do in the next 2 years. We have clear goals, but we documented, about 11 of them. and in each group, they were able to assist through the road map we prepared. We also realized that there is still room for improvement in term of the way we are structured, how do we set up smaller working groups that can make people more productive and for example: highlighting the issues that Africa is dealing with. We already have a group of non-revenue water and that could be reinforced. Then we could pick a working group on water quality and reinforce it. We could have a working group on pro-poor services.

Because we look at the SDGs, the focus is on how we increase asset and maybe, more attention should be paid to these aspects. If we just bind our aim under the specialized committee we will lose the momentum and impact that we could have, also in my opinion the working group will draw in more members into the STC overall.

Some of the people don’t come or you think we don’t send more people because they don’t see the value. So, if you move around the room you will see a very few finance people, why? because you go to their group and the are talking about young water professional, they are talking about women and then may be communication. So, a finance person may wonder what am I doing here? so, they don’t come back again. But if we have aspects that can help draw in these different players that we have in the activities, then maybe we could even address more issues and also be able to come up with good project. So, I feel that this is something we can debate and think about and see how it is done. But this time the groups were much focused and we could see that in the quality of the reports that are being generated. What we are pushing ourselves to do is also to have very clear delivables. Many times we talk about capacity building and we say that we went and trained a number of people and we hold that session in this country, but that does not really cut it. We must be able to say for example if we have non-revenue water auditors trainers and we have a couple of trainings, can we develop a Manual of training for trainers? We will not be able to go round all the African countries to bring in auditors because we don’t have the money; but if we have the training or trainer Manual, this can be shared with member utilities and they can begin using it to even start their own training and develop auditors . So, we are looking at such deliverables for women. If we have the network properly formed and we look at the framework, we can document the framework very well and begin to share this out with other people. so, we feel that we can add the value proposition that AfWA will then have for its members through the working group and these working groups can also begin to have their own smaller sections that they can do every four-month.

So, the knowledge product is one of the key focuses on what product can we have at the end of the 2 years. What product can we show when we have the 40 years anniversary to show that AfWA has come a long way? And we have clear products out there.

For me personally, I think we could be much more useful, we may not have a real product but attract some time even the right people; and we need to tap in the think tank of Africa utilities, we need to tap the best people. We need to get people who can move things within the utilities and for me that will be the delight of having this various group properly strengthened so that people will think about the issue we are facing and come up with solutions and then of course link them to science and technology.

Dr ROSE KAGGWA - 2^nd President of STC

Download here