Circle of Blue Interviews Ned Breslin on Hydro-Philanthropy
July 13, 2010
By Circle of Blue
The text below is a transcript from the Circle of Blue radio interview.
Welcome to Circle of Blue Radio’s Series 5 in 15, where we’re asking global thought leaders five questions in 15 minutes, more or less. These are experts working in journalism, science, communication, design and water. I’m J. Carl Ganter, today’s program is underwritten by Traverse Internet Law: tech savvy lawyers, representing internet and technology companies.
There’s often a major disconnect between good intentions and long-term positive change, especially in an era of turmoil, where philanthropy can sometimes do more harm than good. This is particularly true in water, where well-intentioned individuals, agencies and even community church groups have rallied around the need to provide safe drinking water to communities in the developing world. But the simple act of drilling a water well can save lives today, what happens tomorrow when the well stops working and the donors have long gone away? Our guest today, Ned Breslin, likes to challenge the status quo, even turning a critical lens on his own organization, Water for People. His recent paper, Hydro-Philanthropy, asks the tough questions about long held assumptions about foreign aid around water. He lays out a plan to re-engineer how we think about and how we fund life-saving water projects around the world.
So, you’ve shaken things up a bit. Tell us about Rethinking Hydro-Philanthropy, where’d the idea come from?
Part of the reason that Hydro-Philanthropy was written was to try to have a much more honest debate about the impact and effectiveness of water sanitation interventions worldwide. Then it looked at two kinds of subsets: one is looking at rethinking the way that philanthropists invest their money and moving away from 100 percent grant for water and sanitation infrastructure, which I think has now widely been shown to distort markets and to raise questions about the viability of water and sanitation systems over time when people don’t have a financial stake in it from the beginning, and [which is] really challenging the kind of singular sector metric of beneficiaries. Every organization will tell you how many people they helped last year, and that’s a great thing. It’s really important to know how many people got improved services in any given year, but the real question is how many of them have water flowing and latrines used five years after the intervention, or 10 years after the intervention.
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