Toolkit development and gathering feedback from ‘the field’

Since our last blog post in April 2018 (click here), we have been working on developing the structure, content and format for the guidance. We produced an initial draft in early July, and as part of the development process have been obtaining feedback on this document to make sure it is ‘fit for the field’. We are doing this in a variety of ways from workshops and webinars, to online surveys and forums.

A highlight for us, was our attendance at the WEDC (Water, Engineering and Development Centre) Conference in Nakuru, Kenya. This is an annual gathering of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) professionals working in both developing and humanitarian contexts. This year there were over 600 participants from over 40 countries, and a variety of WASH related areas including research, and policy communities.

At the WEDC conference, we presented a paper entitled ‘Surface Water Management in Humanitarian Crises’ (this paper will be available here in due course) based on our literature review. We also delivered a training workshop on the key themes in our toolkit (Figure 1) – we had over 30 attendees and it was a fantastic opportunity to get feedback on our work and discuss our outputs with stakeholders face-to-face. Our lessons learnt from this experience, including on how we might improve how we illustrate key ideas to our audience, have been inputted back in the guidance document we are writing. Overall, the conference was a great success for our project and allowed us to discuss further opportunities with our stakeholders and find out about overlapping projects.

We would like to thank everyone who has already given feedback on the toolkit and been involved in our supporting projects. It has been fantastic to meet with so many different people from a diverse range of organisations working in this space. We are now looking to work with some key contacts to test our guidance with practitioners in the field and review our draft guidance via an online survey.

Over the next few months we are planning on:

• • Testing our toolkit in the field with a number of organisations, focussing on a variety of camps
  • Undertaking a feedback workshop in London, UK
  • Developing a further draft revision of the toolkit for review (these will be updated in to the survey as they are published.)

We look forward to getting further feedback in the coming months, with the aim of publishing at the end of the year.