A beautiful green city and dozens of NGOs and UN agencies; grey suits and colorful traditional outfits together in one room; groundbreaking key notes and surprising side events; usual suspects and curious newcomers. This is the World Water Week in Stockholm. And this year, we were one of the newcomers. Bringing with us our new brochure, our banners and piles of business cards. Ready to present ourselves to the international water sector for the first time on a big event. Our goal? To meet new potential partners: businesses to help us scale our innovations, organizations we can support to address their WASH challenges, and funds that can help us finance our projects and activities.

We Are Open
We believe partnering with businesses and funds is necessary to reach our ambitious goal: to create an enabling environment for sustainable WASH solutions for marginalized people. We want to open up, invite partners to work with us and support them with their WASH challenges. We are a one-stop-shop for sustainable and innovative WASH solutions for marginalized people.

WASH Store
In a small stand that we shared with Akvo, we therefore presented a few of our joint products and services such as the Really Simple Reporting tool and our 3-day workshop Local Finance, and of course our sustainability model called FIETS. In this WASH Store, the audience could immediately see our added value:

1. our local networks and knowledge of the local communities
2. our expertise over the entire scope of water, sanitation and hygiene – financial, institutional, environmental, technical and social
3. the way we create demand for sanitation and hygiene products
4. our products and services that lead to better local governance and community organization
5. our activities that stimulate behavioral change with regard to WASH

The Stockholm World Water Week 2012 was a success for the Dutch WASH Alliance. Besides meeting many alliance partners from all around the world, in our WASH Store we met several interesting potential partners: from a social investment agency to social entrepreneurs applauded for their (technical) WASH innovations and from a potential media partner looking for WASH expertise to large Food & Beverage corporates struggling with water, sanitation and hygiene in their production locations.

Want to know where these potential partnerships will lead us? Stay tuned.

Dieuwertje Damen, communication officer Dutch WASH Alliance