Who we are

Ede Ijjász-Vásquez retired from the World Bank after a 23-year career. He is a nonresident senior fellow in the Africa Growth Initiative at Brooking and an advisor for sustainable development organisations. He led work in a wide range of development topics including global environmental issues, sustainable development, green infrastructure, smart cities, water resources, climate change, agriculture, blue economy, resilience and disaster risk management, fragility and conflict, resettlement, PPPs, ESG, and urban development. He worked in more than 90 developing and emerging countries in all regions of the world – from fragile and conflict-affected countries to high middle-income countries. He also has over 20 years of teaching experience at the graduate level in the US and China.

Peter Conze is a co-founder and partner of the Humboldt-Viadrina Governance Platform, and on the advisory board of the Garment Industries Transparency Initiative. He worked for 35 years for the German aid agency Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammentarbeit (GIZ), where he served as Africa director and was Division Chief of GIZ for Eastern Europe. He also served as government advisor to the Ministry of Finance. He was a founder of Transparency International (TI) and advises on Africa activities. In addition, he is a member of the TI-Germany Board of Directors.

Robert Gakubia is the outgoing CEO of the Water Services Regulatory Board of Kenya. He is an expert on regulation and institutional development issues in the water sector and has significant hands-on experience in water policy, water law, and water sector administration. He was previously Chief Engineer/Director of Water Services at the Kenyan Ministry of Water where he first started his career in public service. He was in the strategic leadership team of the Kenyan water sector reform after 2004 and was a key member of the Team preparing Vision 2030 for the Kenyan water sector in 2005-2007 and the first Medium Term Plan [2008 - 2012] for its implementation.

Dick van Ginhoven is a consultant for the Water Finance Facility (WFF) and UNICEF in the East Asia Regional WASH Programme. He previously was a diplomat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. From 2004 to 2017, he was responsible for the formulation and implementation of the DGIS development policy for drinking water and sanitation. In this period, Dick was member of the Governing Council of the WSP/World Bank, the WSSCC and SWA. He held several positions at the Ministry, in southern Africa, in the Gulf region and in North Africa. He joined the WIN Supervisory Board in 2017.

Vasudha Pangare has been working as a gender equality and social inclusion specialist in the areas of land and water management, environment conservation, climate change, water for agriculture, water supply, rural livelihoods, policy and governance for almost four decades. She has extensive field experience across Asia and Africa. She has contributed to global, thematic, national and programme evaluations of FAO's work in gender, water, and agriculture. She is a Gender Advisor to UNESCO's World Water Assessment Programme, and is an author of the UNESCO WWAP toolkit on sex-disaggregated water data, assessment and monitoring.

Alana Potter is the Head of Research and Advocacy at the Equality Collective, a community-based law clinic in the Eastern Cape. Alana has extensive water sector experience, starting at the Mvula Trust in South Africa, and continuing as lead of IRC’s Africa Regional programme, working with public, private, and civil society actors in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. Alana was Director of Research and Advocacy at the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), and then coordinator of End Water Poverty (hosted by WaterAid), a global civil society coalition of more than 150 civil society organisations in 80 countries focusing on the realisation of their rights to safe water and sanitation and a safe environment. She has and is advising Human Rights Watch; the AMCOW International Task Force; the UN Water Expert Group; the Africa Water Justice Network’s interim steering committee; the Water Integrity Network’s Supervisory Board; Accountability for Water’s global advisory group; Sanitation and Water for All’s grants committee; the steering committee for the Public Interest Law Gathering (2017-2020), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) CSO Coalition, among others.

Fermin Reygadas has 20 years of experience working towards the fulfillment of the human rights to water and sanitation and the equitable management of water resources. He is co-founder and Executive Director of Cantaro Azul and a board member of the first public-community municipal water institution in Mexico. Fermin has served as an advisor to the Water Resources Committees in the Congress of Chiapas and the Chamber of Deputies of Mexico. For his track record of innovation and systemic change, Fermín has been elected as an Ashoka Fellow.

Oriana Romano heads the OECD Water Governance Initiative and coordinates the programme on the Economics and Governance of Circular economy In Cities at the Cities, Urban Policies, and Sustainable Development Division of the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities. Before joining OECD in 2013, she was research assistant and university lecturer in Environmental Economics at the Centre for International Business and Sustainability in London Metropolitan University and at the Department of Social Science of the University "L'Orientale" in Naples. (Naples, Italy).