Networks That Last: What WashDesk Taught Us About Public Systems Change
Part Two: Who Has to Be Part of Success?
In the first article in this series, we looked at one of the ideas that shaped Netcentric Campaigns’ approach to WashDesk from the beginning: physical infrastructure was essential to improving water, sanitation, and hygiene systems, but it could not accomplish the larger public vision on its own.
Many of the challenges identified in local WASH planning were also problems of maintenance, participation, communication, accountability, behavior, and trust. Improving the physical system required strengthening the network of people who would use, maintain, support, communicate about, and ultimately sustain it.
That raised the next practical question: who, exactly, needed to be part of that network?
An organizational chart can tell you which government department has formal responsibility. A conventional stakeholder list can identify agencies, nonprofits, funders, and community leaders already associated with an issue. Neither necessarily tells you who has to work together for an ambitious public outcome to become possible.
For WashDesk, answering that question meant starting with the outcome itself.
Start with the outcome, not the organizational chart
The conditions facing communities made the need for a wider view fairly concrete. In the original WASH network assessment that helped shape the customer service model now used in Ghana, WASH Master Plan data found that only about 61 percent of handpumps were functioning optimally. Roughly 20 percent had been nonfunctional for more than a year. Two-thirds of users were reported to contribute nothing toward operational costs.
Those are infrastructure statistics, but the problems underneath them do not belong neatly to an infrastructure department.
Keeping a water point functioning may involve the person who first notices a breakdown, the mechanic who can repair it, government staff responsible for oversight, people managing financing, local leaders who reinforce participation, and residents who understand what is happening in the community day to day. Sanitation problems may involve municipal staff, waste operators, traditional leaders, schools, businesses, communications outlets, and the people whose practices determine whether an intervention succeeds.
If the assessment had begun with “Who normally works on WASH?” the resulting network would have been too narrow.
Instead, we organized the process around four questions:
- Who must we engage to succeed?
- How will we connect those people to each other?
- What benefits must we arrange for participants?
- What kinds of actions and activities are they interested in pursuing to advance WASH?
Those questions move the exercise beyond identifying stakeholders. They begin to reveal the human operating system around the public goal.
Who has to be part of success?
One simple way we think about this is to start at the end. Imagine the work has succeeded. Communities have better access to safe water, systems are maintained more reliably, sanitation and public health have improved, and residents know how to participate when something goes wrong.
Now imagine throwing a party to celebrate that success.
Who would need to be there because their contribution helped make it possible?
Framing the question that way changes the exercise. Instead of starting with the usual list of stakeholders, you work backward from success and identify the people, roles, and relationships the outcome actually depends on.
The original assessment targeted 25 categories of participants. Some were obvious: government staff, WASH management teams, plumbers, NGOs, contractors, and local government departments. Others showed how much broader the operating network actually was: area mechanics, Market Queens, sachet water producers, private borehole operators, religious leaders, chiefs, food vendors, media, youth leaders, waste-management personnel, politicians, and WASH users themselves.
Importantly, this breadth did not emerge because the assessment team wandered into a series of surprising discoveries. We designed the process around local knowledge from the beginning.
District officers helped establish the initial group because they knew the people, institutions, working relationships, and community dynamics in their districts. We then trained the people conducting the assessment to ask who else they should be speaking with. One conversation led to another, allowing the stakeholder map to expand based on the way the system actually worked on the ground.
That distinction matters. A useful network assessment should be capable of finding actors who sit outside the usual institutional boundaries, but the people closest to the system may already understand why those actors matter.
An area mechanic, for example, may have little formal authority over WASH policy, but if a community depends on that person to repair a broken pump, the mechanic occupies an important position in the network. A Market Queen may never appear in an engineering plan, but markets are places where sanitation, commerce, information, and community relationships intersect. A local radio representative may never repair a borehole, but that person can hear what residents are experiencing and communicate information to thousands of people.
Community members also bring a kind of operational knowledge that professional staff cannot replace. They know what is confusing, which systems are actually being used, what has failed before, and where formal plans collide with everyday realities.
The learning therefore has to move in both directions. Institutions bring expertise, resources, and authority. Communities bring context, lived experience, and knowledge about whether those resources can actually work where they are intended.
From a list of people to a working network
Identifying the right people does not make them a network.
The next challenge is to understand whether people who depend on one another can actually find one another, communicate, and act when something goes wrong.
Area mechanics offered a straightforward example. The mechanics already existed. In some communities, however, people did not know they were available or did not have a reliable way to reach them. That is why we deliberately brought area mechanics into the network: to make their role more visible, connect them more directly to the communities and institutions that depended on their work, and create greater accountability around their role in keeping water systems functioning.
We made a similar choice with the media.
We did not bring radio representatives into the network simply to help promote WashDesk. In some districts, we made them members of the advisory group itself so they would hear complaints, operational problems, and proposed solutions alongside government officials and other WASH partners.
That gave them a purposeful role in both directions. They could carry useful information back to residents while also bringing what they were hearing from the public into the network. Radio became a two-way channel. Broadcasts could educate communities, residents could call in with concerns, and the network gained another way to understand what was happening outside formal meetings.
Because we had built those relationships early, new communication needs did not require starting from scratch. In one district, a radio representative who already understood the work helped establish more regular airtime for WASH discussions.
This is part of why network assessment has to look beyond formal responsibilities. The question is not only who controls which resource. It is also who sees what, who hears what, who is trusted, and who can move information or action from one part of the system to another.
Participation has to create value
Network builders can easily spend too much time thinking about what they need from participants.
We need the mechanic to respond. We need the chief to reinforce the message. We need the broadcaster to provide airtime. We need community members to participate.
People have their own priorities and constraints. A network that continually asks for time, knowledge, or labor without helping participants do their own work more effectively will eventually become another obligation.
That is why we used the original WASH assessment to ask what information, resources, and services would make participation valuable to the people we wanted in the network.
The answers were practical. One participant wanted information from NGOs and the Municipal Assembly about broken pipes and boreholes so repair providers could identify where their services were needed. Another wanted better population data to support medium- and long-term planning. Participants also identified resources they could contribute, including technical expertise, transportation, and radio airtime.
As the work continued, we also looked for needs and opportunities that might otherwise remain less visible. Some women with disabilities, for example, later became vendors at water points. Their involvement was not simply a matter of soliciting feedback from an underserved group. It opened a practical role within the system that created participation and economic opportunity.
That kind of exchange is important. A durable network cannot be organized only around what a project needs people to provide. It has to become useful to the people inside it.
Put the right people in the room, then let them work
The value of intentionally assembling that network became clearer once the advisory groups began solving real problems together.
In one case, a health facility lacked reliable access to water. Because we had brought district officials, WASH partners, and other relevant actors into the advisory group, the facility could raise the problem in a setting where people with the ability to respond were already connected. One of the partners provided a mechanized water system.
The facility later raised additional needs, including sanitation infrastructure and transportation for staff traveling to nearby communities. The network was able to take those concerns up as well. A media representative on the advisory group used his radio platform to keep attention on the problem. Community members subsequently offered motorbikes to support outreach work, while a contractor contributed sand toward construction needs. The district assembly was then able to provide what was still required.
No single person or institution had everything needed to solve the problem.
What changed was the path between identifying the need and finding the people who could respond.
Because we had intentionally connected the relevant actors, they already understood enough about one another’s capabilities to see where they could contribute. A problem could be discussed, acted on, communicated more widely, and brought back into the network as circumstances changed.
That makes meetings more useful too. A meeting populated primarily by people who can report on a problem may produce a good discussion. By deliberately bringing together people who understand the problem, hold relevant resources, communicate with affected communities, and have authority to act, the meeting itself can become part of the operating system.
Over time, those shared experiences also strengthen the network. People learn who follows through, who has useful information, who can open a door, and who needs to be called when a particular type of problem appears. Trust develops through work.
An assessment is a blueprint
The original network assessment did not leave Netcentric Campaigns and its partners with a longer contact list. It produced a clearer picture of the system they would need to build.
It identified people who sat inside and outside the formal WASH structure, the relationships that needed strengthening, the information participants needed from one another, and the kinds of shared work that could turn those relationships into something useful.
The methodology travels well beyond water and sanitation. Climate resilience, public health, democracy, community safety, and other wicked problems all involve people and institutions whose responsibilities overlap without fitting neatly inside one organization.
A useful starting question is not simply, “Who are our stakeholders?”
Ask what success would actually require, then identify the people whose knowledge, influence, labor, relationships, resources, or authority would make that success possible. Bring local knowledge into the assessment early enough to avoid drawing the map from a distance. Understand what participants need from one another, not just what the project needs from them. Then intentionally create the connections and shared work that allow those relationships to become functional.
WashDesk also showed that identifying the network is only the beginning. People who have spent their careers inside particular departments, professions, or institutions do not automatically know how to work across those boundaries.
As the network became clearer, we needed to help a core group develop shared language, practical competencies, and a stronger understanding of their role in building and maintaining it.
That is where the next part of this series will go: from identifying the people the system depends on to helping a core team put the network into motion.
What does the network around your problem look like?
If you are working on a wicked problem, whether in public health, climate, democracy, community resilience, or another complex system, it may be worth asking the same question we asked with WashDesk: if the work succeeds, who will have helped make that success possible, and are those people connected today?
Netcentric Campaigns helps organizations assess those networks, identify the people and relationships a strategy depends on, and strengthen the capacity needed to move from a collection of stakeholders to coordinated action.
If you are seeing similar challenges in your work, or want to explore what a network-centered approach could look like in your own context, we would be glad to compare notes and start a conversation.