Hello and welcome to this module on stakeholder analysis and engagement. As you have seen throughout this course and as you can see behind me, there are quite a number of stakeholders that are linked to faecal sludge management. That's one of the main differences between faecal sludge management and waste water management. Faecal sludge management is much more about people. Especially, sewers are replaced by manual and mechanical service providers. In faecal sludge management, it is not possible to impose blueprints. But this is not the only difference. Often, the role and responsibilities for faecal sludge management are much less clear than for waste waster management. That's why we need stakeholder analysis, understand them and engage them. People in organizations are at the heart of faecal sludge management. In this module we will see how to characterize the key stakeholders, and their main interests and constraints. Then we will see how to determine the degree to which they should be engaged with the participation levels. Finally, we will see how to engage them with an introduction to different involvement tools. The stakeholders in a group, organization, or individual that can influence or be influenced by the faecal sludge management scheme. The stakeholder analysis helps to identify early who will be affected by the project and who could influence the project, positively or negatively. It helps to understand the social and institutional context. This part of the stakeholder analysis is sometimes referred to as political economy analysis. The stakeholder analysis also helps to assess the needs and to plan for the participation of the stakeholders. In a field where the informal sector often plays an important role this is also about how to empower them and bring them on board. Finally, it is also about meeting people and building trust. Let's start with the identification of the stakeholders. First, of course, you have the mechanical and manual emptiers. Then you have the households, in a way the customers, which we could divide in landlords and tenants. Moving to the other end of the sanitation chain, you have the potential end users, like farmers or industries that may use that as a fuel. You have then the stakeholders directly linked to the government which I may call institutions. Among them you have the utility, sometimes named sewage company and they still don't have faecal sludge on their agenda. We have the municipal authorities, which include the technical services and the police. On the higher level, you have the regional and national authorities which may play a role, especially for the legal and regulatory framework. Next, the formal state actors who we often find traditional authorities and influential leaders to whom people may be more willing to listen to. Then you will also find non-governmental organizations active in sanitation, like NGOs or CBOs. and also academic institutions, who often have important advisory role. And finally, last but not least you have the international donors which have an important decision-making power and in some countries are literally leading the faecal sludge management agenda. Once we identify the stakeholders, we need to characterize them. In particular, we want to make sure to identify all potential supporters and opponents of the project and any vulnerable group that may not be given a voice. Typical problems faced by faecal sludge management stakeholders are a lack of influence and recognition. Think, for example, of manual emptiers, who typically operate illegally and even in dark to avoid being seen. For the mechanical emptiers, you have issues such as the cost of transport, traffic, or the lack of dumping sites. Lack of resources and capacities is often a problem at institutional level. You may observe tension between stakeholders like power games between institutions, or competition between private service providers. Lack of awareness, typically at household level. I will let you have a look in the stakeholder analysis chapter of the FSM book to see how you can extract this information. Something important to look at is who has an interest and who has influence, or lack of influence. These figures show the attributes that are relevant to either interest, influence, or both. For example, stakeholder having an activity linked to faecal sludge management have an interest. Authority that are not directly related but still have the power to block the project, have influence. Municipal authorities would be in the middle having both strong interest and also influence. Recognizing this, you can then draw an influence interest matrix. So, for example, if a small company providing an emptying service has an interest in our new faecal sludge management scheme, but not much influence, we put it here. A national entity may have a strong influence, for example for delivering permit or fines although it does not have the direct interest in the project. So we would put it here. Or the municipal authorities, as we saw, have both an interest and influence, so we put it there. Now the question is how to engage the stakeholders? First, we need to define the level of participation. There are four main ones, information which goes one way. So you give information to some one. Consultation, which goes two ways. So you ask people for their opinion. Collaboration, where you develop your project together. And finally, empowerment or delegation where you give power to the others. In a simplified approach, we can try to identify appropriate participation levels, based on the influence interest matrix. For example, the stakeholders located here with low interest and low influence just need to be kept informed. Those with low influence and high interest need to be consulted and sometimes empowered. Those with a low interest but high influence, need to be informed or consulted. And finally with these, you would rather aim at consultation, collaboration or even delegation at the end of the process. Know that the stakeholder analysis is an iterative process. So a stakeholder that is here at the beginning, may gain influence if it is empowered, and may end up there. Typically, this could be the case with an organized group of mechanical service providers. There are different tools to engage stakeholders. For example, personal meetings, household surveys, focus group discussion, workshops, site visits, participatory mapping, media campaigns, advocacy or lobbying, or mediation. Please refer the faecal study management book to learn more about these involvement tools and to which level of participation they correspond. You may also have a look at the module Tools for Institutional and Political Economy Analysis for Sanitation Solutions in our MOOC on Sanitation Planning. Remember that the goal in the end is to be able to define and allocate clear roles and responsibilities which the respective stakeholders will endorse in the long run. We must be aware and must agree on what they will have to do and especially, what they will have to pay. You don't want your FSM system to collapse because vacuum truck owners don't agree to pay the tariff, because emptying fees are unaffordable for households, or because the utilities or authorities did not secure enough funds to run your treatment plant. It sounds logic, but unfortunately that issues are often the case. You will learn more about financial and institutional arrangements in the two next modules. What I presented in this module is a simplified approach to stakeholder analysis and involvement for you to get introduced the topic. Of course, there is much more. You now got a first glimpse into how to characterize stakeholders, and into the different participation levels, and how this can help you decide how to involve stakeholders. Remember that this is iterative and should be done throughout the planning process. Start thinking about who would be the key stakeholders in your city. Start mapping the relationships between them. Try to think on how you could bring them in the same table. The social aspect of faecal sludge management, is very important and make sure that at whatever level you are you take people's needs and constraints into account. As a key final message, I want to say that it is worth to invest the time and resources, to understand and involve the people because involvement leads to commitment and project ownership. Good-bye.
