- Building capacities of local and national partners in data collection and monitoring for use in lobby and advocacy - Strengthening local organisational capacities in reporting their project activities for development

Akvo has over five years’ experience in strengthening the capacity of a wide variety of local or regional (non-)government organisations working on advocacy related to themes including water, sanitation, ICT, health, economic development, food security and education. The organisations all work on programmes designed to tackle chronic poverty and follow principles established by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs - so encouraging local accountability, co-financing and community financing and collaboration between local and regional partners. Akvo strengthens partner’s capacities in using Really Simple online Reporting (RSR), Akvo FLOW data collection and monitoring, Akvo Open Aid and Akvopedia knowledge sharing platform. Akvo’s network consists of almost 2000 users that share the information of over 1900 projects with over 5500 project progress updates in an online database. The impact of their activities can be followed over time through narrative updates from partners in low and lower middle-income countries.

Akvo promotes sustainable data collection and monitoring for environmental and equitable development purposes. In this specific program our mere objective is to apply our tools for data collection that contributes to sanitation services and water management that avoid pollution, promote equality and assure fair distribution and nature conservation.

Akvo supports the country team with Programme Monitoring & Evaluation (PME) support and shares its expertise in data collection and open data management to help lobby and advocacy efforts. Furthermore Akvo takes the lead in developing a PME & Learning framework to monitor and evaluate the country program results.

Akvo will work within Watershed to: - transfer relevant lobby & advocacy experience to the country teams - bring the country teams relevant (governmental) contacts and potential financing entrances as well as potential CSO partners; - contribute in the country teams to the capacity building strategy (at first, and then execution) for lobby and advocacy; - provide tools for monitoring and reporting, and train users in using them. - lead the construction of the overall Watershed PMEL framework - assist the country team to translate the PMEL framework into a country specific ones;

CSO's and governments

Dialogue and dissent for universal and sustainable WASH

Many organisations do not have capacity for data management and therefore lack support of hard facts for there lobby & advocacy efforts. In many cases governmental decisions are not based on data-driven processes.