It has been a few weeks since we launched our new system at Stockholm Water Week.

After the major steps we have been taking over the last months, I feel it is time to take a deep breath, get things reorganised and develop a clear strategy for the road ahead.

For that reason I am particularly looking forward to our next support partner meeting, that will take place on the 16th of October, followed by the Akvo team weekend during the days after. We will also be able to visit the building in the Hague, to where we relocate our main office, later his year.

Photo: Climbing the steps into the Akvo office in Delft. Over the last weeks we have gone through the steps that were needed to formally register Akvo as a foundation.

It is with great pleasure that I am able to share the news that our submission for the Schokland Funds at the Dutch Ministry for Development Cooperation has been approved. A subsidy of 1 million Euro will be released over the years to come, as a matching fund. We are still looking for the remaining investments that we expect to need until we break even, probably around 2012.

Over the last weeks we have gone through the steps that were needed to formally register Akvo as a foundation, based in the Netherlands. Jeroen van der Sommen and Fon Koeman have already agreed to take up a position in the three-person board that will overlook our work. It’s great that we can build on their networks and experiences. Thomas and I will represent our team during the first board meeting that we expect to organise later this year.

From the 27 pilot projects that are now in our system, I expect 14 to have received funding before the end of this week. Contributions like the ones from Plieger, EarthWater and TAPPS are clearly demonstrating that we are indeed attracting ‘additional’ flows of money to provide poor people with water and sanitation, as we expected. Regular easy to understand feedback from the field is now essential to meet the expectations that have been set. That is far from an easy job, but examples like this project from PRACTICA in Cameroon clearly show that things are happening.

The main challenge is to get this process of short text and picture updates during projects kick-started. The use of our Really Simple Reporting module might technically be easy, but I expect it will take some time before it will be integrated into normal working practices on field level. There is always the risk it is perceived as an additional ‘monitoring layer’, compared to the start of a process that aims to make life easier for those closest to the problems. For me personally it is also the start of a process of building out relations with those partners that are eager to implement and use our tools. Those are the ones we need, when we are ready to scale.

On the partner meeting on the 16th I would like to talk about the idea of a number of minimum project updates that we could jointly agree on. In the end it is in everybody’s interest to get this engine running, but I won’t be surprised if we have to put our feet down once in a while, before we get where we want to go.

Peter van der Linde is cofounder and partner director of Akvo. Peter will be addressing the TBLI conference in Amsterdam on 13 November, on the topic “Could and should investing in water and sanitation for the poor be made into good business?”