A global community of practice: creating resource centres that build capacity in local WASH service provision

Since 2001, the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC) has explicitly promoted the concept of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector Resource Centres to provide sector capacity building products and services. These centres operate mainly at national level, but focus capacity building at the decentralised WASH governance level, including local authorities and service providers. Products and services centre on providing better overview, access and use of existing WASH information and knowledge to improve the provision of services. The IRC Resource Centre Development Programme (RCD), which ran from 2001 to 2006, was designed as a partnership for joint learning and sharing in capacity building, and was implemented in 18 countries. To support the initiative, a global community of practice on resource centre development was created. In IRC’s current work, the resource centre development concept is carried forward in its six regional programmes. This paper presents the experiences of the global RCD community of practice in providing support to local WASH action.