2018•11•30     Melbourne

Karial slum, one of the urban slums in Dhaka. One billion people, one out of three urban dwellers are living in slum conditions. (UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, UNESCAP 2009) Photo Credit:Kibae Park/Sipa Press

Dr David Tan participated in the 2018 annual meeting for the RISE (Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments) project, which took place at Monash University, Melbourne on the 26-30 November 2018. RISE is a real-world intervention on water and sanitation for health, taking place in twenty-four locations in Makassar, Indonesia and Suva, Fiji. He was there to learn about the project and explore ways to develop an implementation research component for RISE.

The meeting was an extended workshop addressing the ongoing logistical, directional, and epistemological challenges of RISE. These are substantial but expected issues in a complex, interdisciplinary, and international project. Dr Tan co-led a session on interdisciplinarity, during which he presented a role for implementation research, rooted in learning processes and mental models, in order to facilitate translation and scale-up of the RISE intervention.

Key outcomes for UNU-IIGH were connections made with the Objective 1 team and the Indonesian in-country team, which would be critical to making any implementation research component work. Following discussions during the meeting, the team are working to identify the boundaries for an implementation research project and develop a framework for studying and capturing the learning processes around project implementation.

• Developing an implementation research component that will enable and inform water-sensitive interventions to address sanitation and flooding issues in informal settlements. These are significant problems that have large impacts on population health, and require evidence-based policy and practice for effective solutions.
• Agreement with Objective 1 team members to develop ways to use mental models for documenting learning processes. This, paired with quantitative and qualitative data from the assessment objective teams, will form the core of the implementation research component.