IRC Associate | Senior sanitation specialist
Erick Baetings has worked for more than 25 years in the WASH sector. He has extensive working and living experience in Nepal and Bhutan (14 years), Zambia (4 years) and Lao PDR (4 years). For his current assignments he travels regularly to Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia.
When realising safe sanitation avoid making pit emptying an afterthought. Read more...
Testing a simple tool to assess faecal waste flows in a real life situation can be a lot of fun. The results though can at best be described as enlightening and at worst as shocking. Read more...
Systems thinking for safe services; how water, sanitation and solid waste service chains are interlinked Read more...
On World Toilet Day, I am sharing a positive story to inspire everyone. Read more...
Solutions that benefit both consumers and suppliers are required. Read more...
How am I going to vote? Read more...
Accountability is crucial in ensuring that public officials take responsibility for their duties and are answerable for their actions. Read more...
Two meetings on urban sanitation held at the Stockholm World Water Week (SWWW) showed that there is increasing interest in urban sanitation. Read more...
A group of gifted local performers with different disabilities made us realise that going to the toilet is not as easy for everyone as you might think. Read more...
On the third day of the regional learning event we reflected on the field visits and discussed what we learned. Read more...
During a field visit we observed some seriously big and fancy toilets in a rural village. Read more...
Today we were told that the Siem Reap (or Angkor Wat) half marathon has a clear finish line, but that it is unlikely that anyone of us will reach that mile stone. Read more...
2015 and the Millennium Development Goals are almost behind us. The new global goals for sustainable development are expected to inspire and create a new determination for all of us. What has IRC learned during 2015 and how are we moving ahead in 2016? Read more...
For the WASH sector as a whole to achieve greater impact, more organisations must address their gaps in organisational capacity and will need to embrace capacity development holistically and more systematically. Read more...
Implementing a highly successful rural sanitation and hygiene programme in East Indonesia has taught us some important lessons. The most relevant being that approaches designed and applied to implement a successful programme are not necessarily scalable. We learned that to be able to work at scale... Read more...
The 2014 update on Progress on Sanitation and Drinking-Water (WHO and UNICEF, 2014) mentions that between 1990 and 2012, open defecation decreased from 24 per cent to 14 per cent globally. However, the update also states that more than one third of the global population – some 2.5 billion people —... Read more...
In many parts of the world it is not done to ask questions about someone’s loo or toilet. It is not discussed among neighbours or friends. Usually that is the case in places where sanitation works perfectly and is not considered anything special. Read more...