Innovative Management Strategy Provides Drinking Water to Developing Countries

摘要

Dr. Alexandre Brailowsky, Manager (Sustainable Development), Aguas Argentinas S.A. (part of the ONDEO-SUEZ Group), is a doctor who has spent his career in the "Medecin Sans Frontieres" organization, an independent humanitarian medical aid agency. Dr. Brailowsky has bridged his careers with a doctor's conviction: giving medicine to people is useless if they can't drink pure water. He first formed this conviction working at refugee camps in Somalia, Kenya and Angola, where billions of people were living in sanitary emergency. As the coordinator of the emergency programme, he was also sensitized to the managerial dimension of this kind of project, and especially to the need for effective coordination between the various stakeholders such as the national government, local communities, nongovernmental organizations and international development agencies. In 1993, he went to Haiti during the dictatorial regime and faced a new situation. There the poverty is not temporary; the slums of Port-au-Prince are fifty years old, and as Dr. Brailowsky said : "the emergency is to find sustainable solutions". He worked on several projects with the MSF before deciding to establish himself as a local doctor in the slums of Port-au-Prince. In the unpaved streets of shantytown he became involved with the non-governmental organization GRET (Research and Technological Exchange Group), trying to provide pure water to the poor community. Dr. Brailowsky helped them to realize the project and was rapidly recognized by the organization for both his competence as a coordinator and his knowledge of social engineering. Then, Dr. Brailowsky was hired by GRET and confirmed his assumption: the child mortality rate falls rapidly with improvements in sanitary conditions. Over a five-year period, 500,000 people obtained access to clean water because of the participative management of Dr. Brailowsky and his collaborators. With his wealth of know-how in participative management, he joined Aguas Argentinas in 1999 to develop new programmes for implementing water service in the poorest neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. For three years these programmes have functioned well, and in this article, Mr. Brailowsky talks about this experience.