ICT4WASH102: ICT for Water Service Providers

Anu Sridharan is the Co-Founder and CEO of NextDrop, which was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2017 cohort. Before this, she and her co-founder ran NextDrop Inc- a profitable business selling urban water data to over 10K consumers, global brands, and governments. She was recognized by the Forbes 30 Under 30 List, and Fast Company's 10 Most Innovative companies in India for her work.

Rosemary Rop is a water and sanitation specialist based in Washington D.C. She assists World Bank clients in selected countries through their ministries, regulatory agencies and utilities to provide services to marginalized people.

Rosemary led the innovation of MajiVoice, a solution that incorporates ICT to helps utilities improve urban service delivery, while enabling social accountability and regulatory oversight. Rosemary joined the WBG in 2005 and has worked in South Asia, Latin America, East and West Africa regions. She holds a BA and MA in social anthropology, and post graduate training on regulation, cross sector partnership, and water and electricity utility regulation.

Dr. Annie Feighery is a behavioral health scientist specializing in maternal and child health and technology. She is the co-founder and CEO of mWater, a tech startup that leverages real-time, cloud-based management tools to catalyze the work of health professionals and governments around the world. mWater is a free platform used to map and monitor critical infrastructure in low-resource regions like water sources, sanitation facilities, and health clinics in 135 countries and manage them with mobile tools including surveys, tickets, and team assignments. Dr. Feighery is the mother of three children and lives in New York City. 

Evan A Thomas, PhD, PE, MPH is an Associate Professor and Director of the Sweet (Sustainable Water, Energy and Environmental Technologies) Laboratory, and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University. Evan works at the interface of engineering, environmental health and social business, with professional experience working in government, industry, non-profits and academia. Evan holds a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a registered Professional Engineer (P.E.) in Environmental Engineering in the State of Texas, and holds a Masters in Public Health from the Oregon Health and Science University.

At Portland State, the SweetLab develops and implements cellular and satellite based "Internet of Things" sensor technologies designed to improve the collection of, and action on, data in global health programs. We deploy and study high efficiency cookstoves, water pumps, household water filters, sanitation systems, pedestrian footbridges and other developing world appropriate technologies. The SweetLab has projects in India, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Haiti and other countries.

Cory serves as the Customer Success Manager of Fulcrum, a mobile data collection platform. His loves of building technology platforms that solve problems has been prevalent throughout his life. After graduate school he went to work for FEMA. While at FEMA he developed platforms that shorten response times after disasters, increased accuracy of damage assessments, and allows hurricane evacuates to see aerial imagery and the condition of homes remotely from a website. He now leads the Fulcrum product team in developing the most successful mobile data collection platform on the market, currently used in over 120 countries.

Eng. Joseph K. Terer is a Kenyan national who is a holder of a BSc Degree in Agricultural Engineering and MPhil in Environmental Studies (Planning and Management) and 30 years combined practical experience in soil and water conservation, water resources and environmental management and project management. 

He is currently the Managing Director for Kericho Water & Sanitation Company Ltd handling administrative and technical issues that include implementation of the strategic plan and policies, acquisition and overseeing implementation of an ERP System (Sage Pastel Evolution) that covers Accounting, Procurement and Payroll, implementation of Mobile Meter Reading System (MMR) that feeds into the SMS Billing System and other ICT system such as M-Pesa, WashGIS among many other digital platforms. 

 He has work experience in public service having work in Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture scaling the ranks to become a Provincial Land and Water Management Officer. From 2006-2015, he worked with the Nile Basin Initiative as an Assistant Project Manager shortly and rose to be the Project Manager.

Brian Banks is Director of Strategic Initiatives at Global Water Challenge. Mr. Banks has worked in the WASH sector for nearly a decade, with an emphasis on southern and eastern Africa. In support of Coca-Cola's Replenish Africa Initiative, he has overseen a WASH investment portfolio of over $20,000,000 in core investment across 29 projects in 16 countries. He has managed water projects in Rwanda and Uganda, and supervised programs across East Africa. In addition to his WASH project management, Mr. Banks has worked extensively on improving sustainability throughout the WASH sector. This has included leading the efforts surrounding the WASH Sustainability Charter, and supporting the organization of the WASH Sustainability Forums over the past six years.

More recently, Mr. Banks has been leading the Water Point Data Exchange which has harmonized over 250,000 records of water point data to better understand sustainability challenges and solutions. Prior to Mr. Banks’ work at GETF, he helped pilot GlobalGiving’s “In the Field” program, travelling throughout Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda to evaluate social programs including water, health, education, and enterprise development. Banks is a Project Management for Development - Professional Certified project manager with an MA in international politics from American University.

Grégoire Landel is a Franco-American social entrepreneur and the founder of CityTaps. He is a feminist & a humanist. He studied engineering in the USA at Princeton, MIT, & Columbia University and worked in software in San Francisco and Kampala before moving to Paris in 2005, where he became an expert in the water/finance nexus in developing countries. This is how he developed his vision for CityTaps which he launched in 2015. Grégoire is married and the father of 3 children.

Mr. Fadel NDAW is a Senegalese national and currently works for the World Bank as Sr. Water & Sanitation Specialist in Egypt. He was previously the coordinator in South Africa of the Water Operators Partnership-WOP Africa, a capacity building program for African water utilities. But Fadel is most well known as being during 15 years the coordinator in Senegal of the urban water sector reform and the water MDG's program (PEPAM). He has recently published a World Bank global study examining the impact and benefits of the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the water and sanitation sector.

Mark de Blois is a Dutch National and CEO/founder of Upande Ltd. He worked as a GIS specialist for 20 years. Having started in the Netherlands providing consulting services and GIS training to largely governmental organizations, Mark eventually joined Google Kenya where he oversaw a team helping establish Google Maps. Mark left Google in June 2009 to inaugurate Upande (a name refers to ‘location’, ‘direction’, ‘destination’, ‘alongside’ and ‘up’, all of which are terms commonly used in GIS). Upande has been developing their own products for several years including WaSHMIS.com, VirtualKenya.org and ViPiMo.net.

Courtney S. Roberts is a project manager and strategist working at the intersection of technology, innovation, partnerships, and global development. She has nearly 20 years of experience leading cross-functional teams to implement projects in two dozen countries and domain knowledge in private sector development, health, and education. As founder of Moonshot Global Consulting LLC, Courtney works directly with clients to shape the engagement and leads the Digital Development, Knowledge Management and Learning, and Impact Measurement practices. She teaches Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning at the American University’s Graduate School of International Service.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtneysroberts/

Halima is a trained environmental auditor, having worked in the environment and ICT space for over 10 years. At Wonderkid Multimedia she specializes on training, project management and M&E activities on private and public sector ICT projects across Africa. For the last 5 years the team has been engaged with the water sector, developing enterprise solutions to support utilities to enhance service delivery. This began with MajiVoice a citizen feedback solution that has been adopted by 9 utilities in Kenya. The team has gone on to develop more business critical applications for the sector that support commercial and technical operations. Halima has Bachelors' degree in both Geography and Business, and is a qualified environmental auditor with the National Environmental Management Authority. 

Nicolas (Nick) Dickinson is an IRC associate and independent consultant at WASHNote. He brings his experiences in the WASH sector, capacity building and information and communication technology (ICT) as well as his affinity for people to his work with governments and business on achieving sustainable services.

He has worked across Africa with governments to strengthen pan-African, national and local monitoring and evaluation systems, including assessing these systems in multi-stakeholder processes. Most recently, he is currently working on Western and Central African programme to strengthen monitoring and evaluation of WASH services in nine countries across the region, provides advice on monitoring and evaluation in Ethiopia and has worked on the monitoring indicators and reporting system for the African N'gor Commitments on Sanitation.

Nick Dickinson also follows the latest developments in business models using ICT to innovate WASH and energy services and sits on Grant Panel of the GSMA Mobile for Development Utilities Innovation Fund (http://gsma.com/m4dutilities) and has facilitated numerous events which showcase these innovations such as the ICT Marketplace at the Rural Water Supply Network Forum. His interest in making data more useful for professionals and lowering the cost of using ICT has led to his work on international data standards such as the Water Point Data Exchange (www.waterpointdata.org). In addition, he worked on the life-cycle costing of water and sanitation services, including the development of tools and methods for governments and other professionals in the WASH sector.

Some projects he worked on in the last five years include SMARTerWASH (scaling up district monitoring in Ghana in 6 of 10 regions), KnowledgePoint (a cross-sector cross-organisation Q&A service), Sustainable Services at Scale, and WASHCost.

Before starting at IRC, he worked as a consultant on various projects including an evaluation of the Nile Basin Capacity Building Network of River Engineers (NBCBN-RE) and co-organising the 50th anniversary symposium in 2007 of UNESCO-IHE, Water for a Changing World: Enhancing Local Knowledge and Capacity Symposium. He started his own business in designing custom content management systems (CMS) to help small business manage their content online using simple intuitive interfaces and clean designs.

Nick has an MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management from Oxford University. He received a BSc in Chemistry/Biology and a BA in Political Geography from University College Utrecht, both Cum Laude.