Interview with Patrick Moriarty, WASH governance specialist for WASHCost Ghana

Interview with Patrick Moriarty on 18 February, 2010 by Pascal Dabou, DCO for WASHCost Burkina Faso about “The Harmonisation of Research Methodology” meeting held between the Burkina and Ghana WASHCost teams in Ouagadougou from 13-15 February 2010.

Pascal Dabou (PD): What were the objectives and expected outputs? What is your definition of “harmonisation”?

Patrick Moriarty

Patrick Moriarty (PM): I saw this more as a learning and sharing meeting than a harmonisation meeting. If we want to know at which level to harmonise between the two countries, it would be at the level of the basic questions we are asking. I don’t think it would be interesting to harmonise to the level of having the same questionnaires because the way we ask questions and the contexts are different. Countries ask slightly different questions, collect slightly different information and that is fine. For me, the usefulness was in having a bit more time to share different approaches with the bigger team. We do a lot of sharing in the global research meeting with two or three people from each country, which is not enough, and a very tight agenda. Here we have a more relaxed agenda and a good representation from the two teams. So it was possible for people to interact in a different way by paying more attention to the different tools we are using for data collection and analyses. We should not think we are enslaved to harmonise everything.

PD: What is the benefit of such meetings for the regional and / global team (s)?

PM: It was a very nice opportunity for the Ghana and Burkina teams to discuss some common issues which I am sure you will feed up to the global team. This meeting was primarily of interest to the region.

PD: Was the time allocated sufficient for the discussions: is three days a reasonable time for so important topics to be developed?

PM: I think the time was plenty. If you made it longer, people would not come. Maybe we could have been a bit more efficient when people were reading e-mails rather than contributing to the meeting. One lesson we could learn about meeting management is to be clear who is leading each section and what the objectives and duration are for each of section.

Pascal Dabou

PD: Should we not extend such a meeting to all the WASHCost countries?

PM: There is a level of similarity in the conditions and experiences between Burkina and Ghana teams that cannot be applied to the Indian team which has a very different context. If the Mozambique team was around the corner it could have been beneficial to invite them, but unfortunately that is not the case. This is a question of practicality because you would have to add another four days of travel to the meeting duration. To me the real benefit was the involvement of the full team or almost all of it, and that you never get that in the global meeting. I, Christelle Pezon, Dr Klutsé, and Dr Kwabena meet each other a lot. But there are other members of the team who have never been involved. So it is very useful for them and for the process documentalists to meet each other. The same applies to meeting some the partners we are working with. We have to accept that Ghana and Burkina are neighbours and that puts us in an exceptional position. It gives us special responsibilities to try to coordinate a bit more than we expect the Indians and the Mozambicans to do. We even share the same water.

PD: Could you say a word about the involvement of Learning Alliance (LA) members in each country?

PM: To be honest, I do not know much about how the Burkina Faso LA works. I am tempted to say that in Burkina you still tend to think about the LA as a group of people. You sometimes talk about the Task Force and sometimes about the LA meetings. In Ghana we see the LA more as an approach to embedding, so we count everybody that we are interacting with at whatever level. Some come to few meetings and some to other meetings. Others never come to our meetings. Some are Task force members and some are not. We make a lot of effort to show our findings. Even from our small pilot, Dr Nyarko has developed some short presentations which we bring to people’s offices and discuss with them. We take them for lunch and ask what they think about our findings, so a lot of our interactions with our LA members are very informal. That is especially the only way to interact with big men at the top of the sector, because they will never make a time to come to a one day LA meeting. So, it is better to go and see them with a clear knowledge of what you want to tell them.

The other thing we do a lot is to be present in other people’s platforms. There is no water sector meeting that happens in Accra at which a WASHCost team member is not going to attend. If it is a meeting about technology I may be there to tell them not to think only about the capital cost of technologies but rather the full life-cycle cost (LCC). If it is a meeting about harmonisation we will be there to say they should think about sustainability and make sure the LCC is included in their approach. Alex, Dr Nyarko, Michelle or I will always participate. So WASHCost is really seen as an important actor in the sector.

PD: What are your conclusions?

PM: I do not think it realistic to have this sort of meeting at the global level, but we should think seriously about how to strengthen and formalise regional collaboration between Burkina and Ghana. This could be maybe at the level of involvement of some of our LA partners in June so that other countries benefit from how to involve them.