We were honoured today to receive Ms. Tineke Huizinga-Heringa, Secretary of State (vice minister) of the Netherlands Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management.

She opened our side event, “Delivering Big, using internet tools to transform the pace of water and sanitation development”. Around 100 Stockholm World Water Week delegates came along to participate - thank you to everyone for spending your lunch break with us.

Photo above: Tineke Huizinga-Heringa, Secretary of State (vice minister), Netherlands Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management talks in the Akvo lounge with Sunita Nadhamuni, CEO of Arghyam.

The panel was chaired by Jeroen van der Sommen, co-founder of Akvo and director of the Netherlands Water Partnership. The session was brought to life by Sunita Nadhamuni, Arghyam, Bert Diphoorn of UN HABITAT and our own Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson, Akvo. Thomas even delivered (for the benefit of the techies out there) a “Just one more thing” moment, when he announced Akvo now has a direct upload feature for images via SMS.

Photo: Jeroen van der Sommen, Akvo and Tineke Huizinga-Heringa, Secretary of State (vice minister), Netherlands Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management

For more photos, click on the collage below.

Thanks to all of the team for their help getting people to come along, during a busy conference. I’m indebted to you all.

Click here to view all the latest images from and around the Akvo lounge at Stockholm World Water Week. We’re captioning them as we go.

A marketing industry fundraising tournament has today committed €17,239 of funding to two Akvo water and sanitation projects. The projects are being showcased as a great example of project and fund matching at Stockholm World Water Week, the world’s most important annual conference of water and sanitation development experts.

The organisers of the TAPPS Beach Volleyball Tournament have chosen two Akvo projects to fund with the proceeds of its upcoming weekend event, to be held on 23 August.

Govert van Eerde, the tournament organiser and himself a successful Dutch internet businessman, chose to channel funds into Akvo projects because it was possible to assign the funds to specific projects.

“I love the Akvo system – it’s easy to follow and easy to identify projects you would like to fund,” he explained.

The tournament is funding this €12,539 project in Ethiopia, to provide six small villages with 35 rainwater harvesting systems, 35 latrines, and to educate children and women about water and sanitation. The local field partner is ERHA and the support partner is the RAIN Foundation.

It is also contributing €4700 to this €13,500 project to build latrines for a community of 2500 people living in a refugee camp in Burao, Somaliland. This provides essential funds to unlock a grant of €8,800 from Aqua for All.

Now in its ninth year, the TAPPS Beach Volleyball Tournament is the Netherlands’ biggest outdoor online media event. It brings together teams from across the Dutch internet media industry to raise money to provide clean water and proper sanitation to those who have none. This year’s tournament will be held on the Dutch coast on 23 August 2008. More than 1,000 online media professionals will descend on the picturesque beachclub location of ‘Het Stranhuis’, in Wijk aan Zee.

They will represent over 80 companies. Teams pay €1,250 to play, and €250 from each is donated to Earth Water (more on them here). The two organisations are able to choose where to invest the funds, along with 50% of all of the sponsorship raised for the tournament. TAPPS anticipates increasing the amounts it can commit to Akvo projects during the next two years. The first cheque, for €18,000, will be presented this weekend.

You can follow progress on the projects here and here.

Now that we have a live system, we can match funds to projects quickly and easily. The opportunities - and the results - are there for all to see.

Take Earth Water, a new Akvo funding partner, signed up this week. The conversation began a week ago. Now over €20,000 is committed to a water project. That’s what I call action.

A goal for Akvo is that “money and projects should meet in a flash”. Our project and fund matchmaking system has been built to offer a new, simplified way for those with money to browse and select projects to invest in. And it means organisations who seek funds for their projects have a place to showcase them.

Earth Water is a really cool company that connects the sale of drinking water in the developed world with action to provide it to those living in the most desperate situations elsewhere. It has forged a powerful co-branding deal with the UN refugee agency - it’s the only company in the world ever to have the license to use the UNHCR logo on its products. These are sold via retailers in Europe, Canada and the United States. 100 per cent of net profit on these sales is invested in water projects for refugees overseas. It’s a stylish product, too - sharply packaged in a carton, it stands out from mainstream bottled water.

The company does a lot of awareness-building about water issues, too, and the funds going through Akvo come from this activity. It pours huge effort into De Parade, a Dutch theatre festival that tours key cities around the country each summer.

The team runs the festival toilets - yes, like the amazing one you can see up top. They sell toilet artwork to visitors, and under the seats put messages that raise awareness of the worldwide water problem. De Parade has already been to Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht this summer and its 17-day Amsterdam leg ends with a finale on Sunday.

Patrick de Nekker at Earth Water is using the money raised to fund an Akvo project. “Akvo means we can show where the money is going,” was his rationale to me when we spoke earlier. “There is direct contact with actual projects.”

Earth Water, with Parade, have agreed to fund this €20,000 Ceramic Filter Production project in Bafoussam, Cameroon. Run by PRACTICA and ADEID, I’m especially proud of this project, as it was one of the first Akvo projects we commissioned a film about, via the Africa Interactive mobile reporter team. You can see Walter Nana Wilson’s short film on the project here. Walter shot the movie and uploaded the content using a mobile phone. Isn’t technology a wonderful thing?

Added on top of this project package are two follow-on film reports. All along we’ve sensed movies would be a great selling point and reporting method for everyone involved - a film brings so much to life. At next year’s Parade, Patrick and his team plan to feature those movies. While raising more money.

You can follow progress here.

Mark Charmer is a co-founder of Akvo. Photo credit: Earth Water.

Akvo lands in Stockholm this weekend with a new system to show. We’ll be spending time with everyone at Stockholm World Water Week. If you’re there, join us.

World Water Week is the annual meeting for those working to improve the water and sanitation situation of the world’s poor. It’s the event that triggered Akvo two years ago and it’s an important place to tell our story and get feedback from international development specialists. Last year we made many friends there, and said goodbye to many posters.

Above: One of two new images by Vincent Wijers, commissioned to coincide with the launch of Akvo beta in Stockholm, August 2008.

We’d love to see you. You can see our new system in action online, learn how to edit Akvopedia pages, or just spend time chatting with our team about how we might work together in future. You may even choose to live a little, and invest in live projects. We’re the big stand with sofas and computers, in the main exhibition area.

Delivering Big. Debating the future.

We also return to Stockholm to host another panel event. This year we are encouraging leadership-level debate on the ability of internet technologies to help more things happen more quickly.

When: Thursday 21 August 2008, 12:05-13:25

Where: Room K11. Stockholm International Fairs and Congress Center, Älvsjö. You need to be registered for the conference to get in.

What: All being well, Dutch secretary of state (vice minister) Tineke Huizinga-Heringa will be opening the session, and Thomas Bjelkeman will be joined on stage by Sunita Nadhamuni, CEO of our Indian NGO partner Arghyam along with Bert Diphoorn, water and sanitation chief at UN HABITAT. This is the topic of the day:

“Delivering big. Translating knowledge into action through internet technology”

Across the world, new software tools, methods and working practices will transform knowledge sharing, collaboration and project and cost management in the water and sanitation development sector. Organisations must adapt knowledge to many contexts and delivery mechanisms. This leadership seminar explains how and will provide guidance on keeping your people in tune with the changes underway.

In particular, we are keen to explore the ways organisation and activity can be simplified and scaled to meet ambitious but necessary targets such as the Millennium Development Goals. We’ve ordered sandwiches and soft drinks for attendees so you will be fed and watered while sharing your views.

Last year several hundred joined us to ask “Can a Wikipedia of Water quicken the pace of development”, chaired by Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent at the Financial Times. The curious can revisit that debate here. I’m pleased to say that Madhab Nayak’s team at FODRA is now an Akvo project partner, with two projects live today in our new system.

See you there.

Mark Charmer is a co-founder of Akvo. If you want to fix a time to get together with the team, or talk via phone, email me.

We now have 22 projects uploaded into the Akvo system, and the good news is these are distributed more widely around the world than originally expected. Our first projects were either in Africa or in Asia, but our partner Women in Europe for a Common Future (WECF) has changed all that. WECF is a network of women’s and environmental organisations and operates throughout Central Asia and Europe. With their contribution of five projects (located in Armenia, Romania, Georgia, and Ukraine) we now have a geographically diverse package of projects to offer.

(Photo: Project supported by WECF concerning water delivery to Svedlov Village in Armenia)

WECF is a great addition to our network. The development issues facing Eastern Europe are often overlooked – many people still have no proper access to clean water or sanitation. Adding to that are the gender issues which have proven to be crucial in addressing development sustainably. WECF is a partner of Women for Water Partnership (WfW) which is an organisation that has some similarities to the Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP). I hope we are able to explore options to collaborate.

Akhila Jambagi has been helping me gather all the projects into a working format for the Akvo database. Akhila is still in high school and is using her vacation time to help us out here. Her contribution has become essential in getting the work done in time.

On July 24th we held a meeting here at the Akvo office in Delft with all the main partners. We were able to show them how their projects sit in the Akvo system and the feedback was extremely useful.

Further to Mark’s recent blog about Africa Interactive, the team pulled it off – two films produced in two weeks. The first project, supported by PRACTICA in Cameroon, is aimed at the sustainable local production of ceramic filters to address water borne diseases in the area, and is still in need of funding.

Introduction of ceramic water filter production in Bafoussam Cameroon

(and a YouTube version)

The second video concerns a school sanitation project supported by Simavi in Tanzania. This project already has some funding, but Simavi intends to expand the project scope to other schools in the area.
It really is incredible that within the African context a short video report can be made within 2 weeks. I’d like to thank the people at Africanews for their work, and of course the local partners for letting the reporters come by and make the reports. Below is the link to the other video, so enjoy!

Improving water and sanitation in the Osunyai school, Arusha Tanzania

(and a YouTube version)

One more update: WECF is providing us with another project and Aqua for All will deliver 4 projects by the end of the week, making the total 27!

Luuk Diphoorn is partner coordinator at Akvo. He coordinates Akvo’s project activities with our NGO partners across the world.

It’s eight weeks until we introduce our new system at Stockholm Water Week and a lot of things are happening in parallel. While our IT team is deep into software development to rebuild our website and core products, I want to share progress we are making with partners.

Over the past month, we have gathered 17 pilot projects - local field partners spread across India, Madagascar, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Nepal, Malawi and Ethiopia - with help from our initial signed up partners. It’s promising to see that the first funders have also come forward to commit to projects, so we can truly start providing people with safe drinking water and sanitation and field-test the Really Simple Reporting module in a matter of weeks.

A special thanks goes out to the company Plieger that has decided to contribute to the UN year of Sanitation by funding three projects to celebrate its 75th anniversary later this year. To bring some of the initial projects to life and explore dynamic ways of reporting we have agreed with Ben White from Africa Interactive that local African reporters will be making short films about the current situation in two project areas in Tanzania and Cameroon, over the next weeks. I’m convinced they will do a great job.

The Akvopedia is also expanding. Merel Hoogmoed and Bastiaan de Veen from Acacia Insitute, Karin Weijers from Ibota, Nick Dickinson from IRC and David Castello from Waste are creating an initial structure that focuses on appropriate water and sanitation technologies and approaches that have proven to be successful.

A new manual explains how to create an Akvopedia article and we now have the capacity to assist new collaborators. Over the next weeks we will have to mobilize different organizations and networks, to find more volunteers that are willing to invest some time on a structural basis. It would be great if we could get the UNESCO-IHE Alumni network involved here as well.

I am also delighted that Ravi Jambagi, the director of Indus Technology who last week signed a cooperation agreement with us, has offered in-kind help in bringing Akvo to life in India. In true Akvo spirit his daughter Akhilla will join us during her holiday to gain some experience and make sure we are in tune with the younger generations.

I have written before about the steps we need to take before we can become financial sustainable. The EU tender procedure did unfortunately not work out. We got treated with a ‘non realistic and not relevant’ stamp, a letter which I shall put on my office wall to remind me of what we are trying to change. On the 1st of July we expect to hear from our submission at the Schokland Funds in the Netherlands. Indications right now are quite positive.

Yesterday Frederik Claassen initiated a visit with Margriet Schreuders at the Nationale Postcode Loterij head office in Amsterdam that turned out to be a real meeting of minds. The Postcode Loterij generates capital for development (over 225 M Euro) and we will be aiming to get on the list of organisations that receive structural funding from them. Margriet valued our innovative and entrepreneurial approach and we shared some thoughts about ways in which our tools might help the Postcode Loterij to visualise how their investments are spent to the general public, in a dynamic way.

On the Corporate side, Mark has been working on refining our pitch. Our talk this week with Paul Faeth at Global Water Challenge confirmed there are a lot of opportunities in this area, but it will probably take some time to materialise. A special thanks goes out to Bram Ellens at eBay that only needed a few words to get our concept. He has been very helpful in mobilizing his IT network, so thanks for that.

Next week Monday I will be visiting Brussels to learn more about the program aquawereness that Agnes Biesiekierska works on. It will be a great moment to get in contact with the network of Corporates that are involved and witness the progress our partner EWP (European Water Partnership) has been making recently. EWP has many corporate members and we hope we are able to explore opportunities to explain how our system could help its members develop new methods to connect their customers, including mainstream consumers, to development activity.

We met with three of the Tenq team, including Mariska de Vries. 24 June 2008.

This week Mark and I also had the pleasure of finally meeting Tom van de Ven and Mariska de Vries at Tenq. Their office is beautifully situated on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam and sets the scene for the great things they are up to. A percentage of the income that Tenq generates is spent on water and sanitation projects, and we explored possibilities for cooperation that we will follow-up on shortly.

Today I met Siegfried Woldhek, the director of Nabuur, in their new office who has been kind enough to share his experiences in setting up an IT based development organisation. We aim to establish Akvo as a non-profit foundation before August and the set-up of Nabuur (empowered management team, small supervisory board and a heavyweight advisory commission) might ensure the operational flexibility we are looking for. Nabuur is in the process of launching a new website in August and we agreed to organise a follow-up meeting in August to give our cooperation ‘hand and feet’.

Lastly I wish Dieuwertje Damen a lot of success in trying to realize an Amsterdam Water Bar. You have the spirit to make it work and we are happy to help you out. Mark and I really enjoyed the time we spent talking with you.

Peter van der Linde is co-founder and partner – director of Akvo.

Peter and I met again with Ben White of Africa Interactive on Tuesday. I’ve been impressed by Ben’s team’s work to establish a growing network of citizen journalists in Africa. Africa Interactive’s goal is to have a local network of reporters who can act and write independently, and make money through their work, utilising new digital routes to publication. Its home page video describes it better than I ever can.

It’s immediately clear that this network of reporters can enhance the way that NGOs describe local water and sanitation projects, before, during and after they get funding. You’ve probably gathered from our ‘movie theme’ marketing images that we’ve always considered movies to be a fantastic way to bring water and sanitation work to life. Akvo is being designed so that movies can, over time, play a big role in our matchmaking system, which matches funds to projects, and in Really Simple Reporting, which provides a simplified stream of project updates via tools such as SMS and video.

Films don’t just provide a great way to describe solutions, but they help an NGO set out the objectives without being forced to into admin-laden form-filling bureaucracy. And on the basis that a film of a community with no proper sanitation is followed by a film of the same community with sanitation is a powerful report - a way to capture actual changes to physical infrastructure and a way to document social change.

Over time we see films helping to expand the number of people willing to fund small-scale water and sanitation projects. Only so many are organised to review reams of reports, or even the more tabular data that will be in Akvo’s matchmaking system. A film can inspire and engage at a whole new level. Especially if the film is online, so all you need to do is share the link.

Ben White (left), commercial director at Africa Interactive. Luuk Diphoorn (right) of Akvo. Delft, Netherlands, 24 June 2008.

Two films in two weeks?

We struck a deal on the spot with Ben. Africa Interactive will commission its mobile reporters to visit two of our first-phase projects, with the goal of producing video output inside two weeks from go-ahead by the community involved.

The first film will focus on a project managed by Akvo partner Simavi. Already matched to funds, it’s in Arusha, Tanzania, and will provide clean water and sanitation in a local primary school. The local partner is CBHCC (Community Based Health Care Council). The project is in the startup phase and will be one of the first to go live on Akvo later this summer. It could be a prime candidate for a follow-on film later as they start using Really Simple Reporting (RSR). Simavi has confirmed the school principal and the NGO representative will be helping us get the insights and material needed.

We are exploring several options for our second film, from our list of 17 initial projects this summer. We should have it confirmed in the next few days. It’s important we don’t force a film crew on a community - they, and the supporting NGO, need to want it.

Africa Interactive can offer this kind of film-making at a price that makes it attractive to funders, we think. Would you, for example, prefer to invest in a €10,000 schools project that had a written description online, or a €10,600 schools project that combined a written description with a film report on the situation, the implementing team, and capturing the views of the people who will benefit? All of which you can share with others online to get their buy-in, and to follow progress. I know where my money would go.

Creating new networks of reporters around the world who show sensitivity, understand context and can (sometimes) bring humour and optimism to play around the world has long fascinated me. Finding a different way to work with reporters is crucial for an open source project like ours. Just as it costs too much to send in specialist auditors to monitor every project, sending a film crew over from, say, the Netherlands or the United States, with the right experience and ability to get around from Europe would cost at least €15,000.

We’re looking forward to testing this out. If we can prove the process works, we’ll be building local capacity to report on water and sanitation projects in a repeatable, sustainable manner. I’m now away until 15th July. Over to you guys, Ben. Look forward to seeing what you can do.

Related reading: From posters to the real thing – Akvo gets set to make movie history

UPDATE: The team delivered! See the films here and here.

It’s an open-source sanitation project, and if that isn’t weird enough, they’ve got a Bollywood-parody promotional angle. Note the OLPC there. The world gets a little weirder every day. -Bruce Sterling, Wired.

Since we started talking about Akvo at World Water Week in Stockholm, in August 2007, nothing has garnered us as much positive feedback as the Akvo posters. Yes those.

When we were about to begin our side event, a minister from an African country walked in and she said: “That woman, who built herself a toilet. I want to meet her!” People would walk up to us and ask if we had any posters to spare and when were out, the ones posted in the toilets disappeared. Several times people would come up to me and point to the posters and burst out: “I love them!

Mark Charmer was in Amsterdam the other day with Peter van der Linde and met Vincent Wijers, the man behind the posters. Mark told me afterwards:

Vincent is like a vision filter. He questions, challenges, searches. The first 30 minutes is always hard - you argue with him, he claims you don’t have a clear sense of what you’re about. And then you spend an hour absolutely in tune. Then he goes away. And you see what happens. -Mark Charmer

We are extremely grateful to Vincent for lavishing us with his visions of Akvo. It wouldn’t have been the same without them.

Academic institutions are usually amazing places to learn, but can be tough organisations to work with. With limited resources, they tend to focus on the recruitment of great students and on high standards of teaching in their core areas. Working with outside organisations tends to focus on injecting money or equipment via dedicated programmes (in my other line of business, the amazing work of Brigid O’Kane at the University of Cincinatti comes to mind here). Or it involves work placements (I keep in regular touch with Geoff Wardle at Art Center Pasadena, who has great students seeking experience in Europe). That said, I’m still waiting for my invite from the RCA to Joe’s final exhibition this Thursday, despite having acted (willingly I must stress) as his visionary, psychotherapist, editor, dad and tour operator at various points along the way. And finally there are full-scale business incubation initiatives. That’s not a process that’s delivered anyone I know with the big break they needed yet. But maybe I know the wrong kind of people.

So I’ve been curious to see how Akvo can engage with UNESCO-IHE. Akvo is based on the UNESCO-IHE campus in Delft in the Netherlands. It’s a home we share with the Netherlands Water Partnership, which has been based on ‘IHE’s campus since it was formed in 1999.

UNESCO-IHE’s former head of the urban water and sanitation department, Caroline Figueres, played an important role in getting Akvo onto the development map and she continues to support us in her new role leading IICD, a great organisation focused on best practice ‘ICT’ (education language for IT and comms) in the developing world. Her extensive understanding of how water projects actually work out will be invaluable to us, when combined with the power of an organisation focused on developing world IT implementation best practice.

Having UNESCO-IHE actively supporting us would make a big difference as we now seek to scale up our base of active contributors online. Its mission is to educate successive generations of water experts. This video tells the story of how a Dutch education establishment grew from the late ’50s to create a unique new organisation in 2003. The Institute is owned by all UNESCO member states and is the largest water education facility in the world. It’s the only institution in the UN system authorised to confer accredited MSc degrees.

Peter, Malte and I met yesterday with Erwin Ploeger and Maria Laura Sorrentino to talk about how we could connect with the Alumni programme. There are around 13,000 ‘IHE alumni around the world. I’m like a rag to a bull on this one – as far as I’m concerned these people are spread around the world and could be a tremendous asset to us all as Akvopedia editors and contributors. How to encourage them to do so is something I’m looking forward to discussing with Chris Watkins tomorrow, who is coming to visit us here in Delft. What we’re not currently clear on is how much these water practitioners will be willing to start using a wikipedia of water. Ideally this is something we should have researched, but we haven’t. That would have been far harder, more resource-intensive and more time consuming than creating the Akvopedia in the first place. But we now need to get professionals contributing, even simply as high level quality monitors.

UNESCO-IHE’s Maria Laura Sorrentino talks with Akvo. 23 June 2008.

Another opportunity with UNESCO-IHE is to integrate what we’re learning - and doing - into their curriculum. How much should its graduates know about open source and related new technologies? How can this change how they organise projects and networks of people?

Finally, by the end of the summer it will be possible for ‘IHE alumni who are working on projects to upload those that are seeking funding into the Akvo Matchmaking system. If in doubt, access to development funds could be the trigger.

This is another moment where our collective ability to integrate networked organisations with hierarchical ones is going to be a big factor. You can read more on my thinking on that topic here. Certainly we need the next generation of water development graduates to understand how open source, open communications and the internet change the way projects can be specified, matched to funds and reported on. And to benefit us, their interaction needs to break out of a regular, repetitive form based on email shots and industry or alumni newsletters. We need them to begin contributing to the new processes and tools we are building. Every few days. Help us make this happen.