The sector model of development – where people work in specialist areas – has delivered measurable gains but left the most complex problems unsolved. The hardest problems live in the gaps: in the communities that lack all services at once, in the fiscal systems that fund none of them adequately, and in the political economies that treat essential services as separate line items rather than an integrated investment in building a nation. We work across those gaps, not around them.
Over decades, we’ve built a distinctive role as convenors and platform builders – hosting some of the Sanitation and Water for All secretariat staff and chairing the partnership, and supporting the, Agenda4Change, Water Integrity Network among others. These are the routes through which new coalitions form, shared agendas take shape, and the political conditions for collective action come together.
The next generation of alliances will need to reach further – into health, education, energy, climate finance and beyond. We’ve already been building those connections: working with health and education partners on the shared institutional foundations for universal access to water; embedding water resilience in national climate adaptation plans and exploring the transformative potential of decentralised solar for safe water services.
Collective impact at this scale requires partners who share a belief that systems can change, who are willing to work at the pace required to build trust and relationships, and who have the discipline to align strategies rather than simply attend the same meetings. That is the kind of collaboration we seek, and the kind we try to model.
Resources
Learning alliances are our core methodology for building collective action at scale. Our most detailed account of how these work in practice How to Use Learning Alliances to Achieve Systems Change at Scale is a working paper drawing on more than fifteen years of evidence from Ghana, Uganda and beyond. If you’d like to explore the wider body of evidence, our annotated bibliography of Riva learning alliances covers more than sixty publications from projects across Africa and Asia, and is the most complete reference point available. We’re actively seeking partners committed to coalition-building across the public service landscape. In water and sanitation, climate and in public services where our work increasingly, and intentionally, connects. If you are building institutions, reshaping policy or mobilising finance for the public services that nations need to thrive, we want to work with you.