It’s almost exactly a year since the Football for Water programme launched at World Water Day in the Netherlands. Akvo’s role has been to help the partners bring the projects in the three countries online, so everyone can see what’s happening where. Together with Aqua for All we did our first workshop in Kenya in October, focused on three themes – how to make the programme self-sustaining and entrepreneurial, how to communicate what is happening as it happens and how to put in place a formal monitoring process. Each year there will be a new round of projects, in specific districts and schools. I’m pleased to say that the 2013 projects are now all online via Akvo RSR – so you can see for yourself the projects in Ghana, Kenya and Mozambique.
Using technology to improve communications
Football for Water brings together sport and international development, putting football coaches into schools in poor communities, inspiring the kids to improve their skills on the pitch, while teaching them about about water, sanitation and hygiene. Meanwhile school water and sanitation facilities are improved. For each country there is a programme coordinator – Hilda (Ghana), Peter (Kenya) and Manuel (Mozambique). Obviously they can’t travel constantly around all the regions and schools because that would be really expensive and impractical – so they work with local partners (there is one football partner and one or two “WASH” partner organisations in each location). Akvo Really Simple Reporting is being introduced so the coordinators can enable local partners to do their own updates, which makes everything much more real and connected. It also means they can point people to the www.footballforwater.nl site and everyone can see the latest. This reduces communication overhead and demands. We’re also anticipating this helping each country learn from the experience of the others, and motivate everyone involved.
In each country Akvo will host a workshop about communication (focused on using Akvo RSR) and monitoring (so using Akvo FLOW). From 21-24 March we trained 21 people from the seven partner organisations working on Football for Water Ghana. Some staff from IRC and Maple consult, part of the Ghana National Water programme, also joined the Akvo FLOW training.
