Martina Mascarenhas, WLE communications manager, caught up with Emma Greatrix a few days ago to get to know her a little bit better and see how she’s settling in.
Q: Tell me a little bit about yourself- where are you from, what was life like before WLE?
A: I’m from the UK originally but for the last 6-7 years I’ve been living in Africa, working with Wetlands International, a Netherlands-based NGO also working on water, land and ecosystems issues across the world. I worked for the Africa regional office, based in Senegal. I worked there for 5 years, and then when we received funding for new programs on climate change and resilience, water and sanitation, and livelihoods in East Africa, I moved to Kenya to open a new office and get that established. That was a huge administrative process, a learning curve. It was quite interesting to see it start from nothing to now when things are running along quite nicely.
Q: Where were you before Wetlands International?
A: Before that I worked for a consulting company focusing on agricultural development, environmental issues and land rights programs in developing countries, mainly for DFID & the EU. The program that I was involved in for the longest time was on land reform and registration in Rwanda.
For the last ten years, I’ve split my job between program management, which was the main part, and business development. Usually in NGOS and private consulting, everyone has to do both – you always have to think about other funding. So, my job also included working on proposals and donor relations.
I have worked on a few similar water and ecosystems management issues to those we’re going to be tackling in WLE, especially in West and East Africa.
Q: So what made you want to move?
A: I really enjoyed my time at Wetlands International (WI) but I was quite keen when I saw this opportunity to get involved with such a huge research program that could potentially have an enormous and widespread impact. This is quite an exceptional program and it was a case of seeing the opportunity and not being able to let it pass by.
Q: The program is currently at that point where we’re really drilling things down. In your view, what would you say really stands out with regards to WLE? What areas do you think the program should focus on?
A: I can’t say too much yet about the research on the ground but what I can mention is the potential that I see. Often you have two situations at the community level; one is where something is changing in a community and they don’t necessarily know how to deal with it, such as changing rainfall patterns or reduced water availability. That’s where some of the research coming out of WLE can help people directly on the ground. On the other hand, you have many cases of communities where people are trying to do something constructive about the problems they face. They know what’s going on, and often in such a situation, they will be trying some kind of innovative solution, perhaps local reservoirs, sand dams, etc. However, because these are local initiatives, the knowledge doesn’t get shared from one community to another or they don’t have access to tested academic research to show impacts over a long period of time. There could be an opportunity in those cases where such communities could also feed their experiences into WLE. I’d like to see if that will be possible within this program.
Q: One of the challenges with the CRP is that it has so many partners. How do you think CRP5 can work effectively with so many partners?
A: I don’t think it’s insurmountable. There are plenty of NGOs and programs that exist with this many partners that manage to run. The important thing is that we set aside enough time and effort on making it work and with the team that we’re putting together, I am confident it will work since we have people looking at various components, from M&E to gender to communications. The next step will then be to spend enough time to get to know the different partners, see how we can assist them, identify and address their concerns and look at other ways of how can we help and support them.
Q: Any final thoughts as we wrap this up?
A: I think as with any program with so many partners, it’ll take a few more months to organize things. If we set aside enough time for it and establish good relationships by incorporating and addressing concerns as much as we can, things will start running smoothly in time. Another good way to start would be to also look at lessons from other CRPs as well as the Challenge program.
Emma is based at IWMI HQ in Colombo. To contact her, you can email her at e.greatrix(at)cgiar.org or call her on ext. 1210.