Catarina Fonseca is trained as an economist and has a doctoral degree in water sciences. She has over twenty-three years of experience in development cooperation and non-profits of which twenty in the water and sanitation sector. She has pioneered sector development on the understanding of life-cycle costs and financing. She was the WASHCost Director (2008-2013), a large-scale initiative to identify the long-term costs of sustaining rural and peri-urban water and sanitation services. She has been part of the IRC management team and managed the International and Innovation programme from 2012-2019.
Catarina Fonseca was the Director of Watershed, a 5-year strategic programme that run from 2016-2020 to strengthen the ability of citizens to hold governments and service providers accountable for the services they deliver. She is an Associate of IRC and is available for consultancy assignments. Over the past 20 years she has trained, assessed, evaluated and provided technical support to over 50 clients. Since 2019 she has her own company, Pulsing Tide.
Recording of a webinar on lessons learned after nearly four years of intensive research on the use of collective action in WASH by the USAID-... Read more...
Find out in this podcast with Catarina Fonseca of IRC why she refers to finance as the unavoidable building block and which two key costs are... Read more...
How the Aquaya Institute selected a system strengthening approach to overcome the sustainability constraints that other water quality monitoring... Read more...
Without an improved asset maintenance, system it is likely that rural water systems in Ghana will continue to provide unsustainable services. Read more...
An assessment of the potential feasibility, sustainability, and effectiveness of the pay as you fetch (PAYF) management model for water service... Read more...
A preparatory study for a proposal to install a piped water system to serve five communities. Read more...
This document sets out a series of participatory exercises that can be used to design a 2-4 day programme focused on sector strengthening for... Read more...
This document sets out some of the main service authority and service provider functions required for delivery of sustainable rural water supply... Read more...
The UNICEF Framework for Sustainability Results proved to be useful in identifying sustainability challenges and acting upon them. Read more...
Slippage is an expected aspect of behaviour change-oriented sanitation and hygiene interventions, especially those at scale, and not a sign of... Read more...
This paper summarises current donor thinking on measuring sector progress towards developing sustained water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services... Read more...
'End of ownership' models in the water and sanitation sector are generally found in places with a limited public sector and unregulated markets. Read more...
Background note prepared for the IRC event on the 4th of March 2015. Read more...
This tool is one of 25 tools for WASH sustainability reviewed as part of the Triple-S project. Read more...
Briefing note describing the life-cycle costs approach and why it was developed. Read more...