Riva: locally led, globally connected

In January 2026, Patrick Moriarty, IRCWASH CEO announced that IRC was becoming a federation of independent, locally led and globally connected organisations rather than a single NGO. Ghana registered first, the Netherlands followed. The people and the commitment would carry over; what changed was where authority sits — leadership where it belongs.

In Kigali this month, that federation takes its name. We are Riva.

The name bonds us to water: to its life-giving force, its ability to find a path through obstacles, its flow and its connectivity. It defines what we intend to be — a lifeforce, working alongside nation builders.

Behind it lies a longer argument: that water and sanitation is a systems problem, and that durability follows from political commitment, institutional investment and professional services rather than from hardware. We have made it for over 50 years, and it has largely prevailed. Riva is the organisational form that lets us act on it. The Dutch office becomes one member among others; the network entity in The Hague is a hub collectively owned by the members. This is not cosmetic — it determines where decisions are made and to whom we are accountable.

That accountability has to be earned in more than one place. Members and programmes work across sub-Saharan Africa; Bangladesh anchors a growing presence in Asia; in Europe, the Water Resilience Framework has opened a serious conversation about populations European services still leave behind. Through the One For All alliance with Water For People, the agenda reaches Latin America. Our Systems Academy has trained more than 8,000 professionals in 125 countries. A network spanning these regions carries what is learned in one directly to another — the climate-resilient governance Bangladesh is building speaks directly to ministries facing the same pressures in the Sahel.

The work has also risen in specification. Diagnosing why a system fails and executing the reform that corrects it call on different depths of expertise: the second requires people who have set tariffs and defended them, turned a failing utility around, or designed the public finance architecture behind a reform programme. We are assembling that bench deliberately, and the federation makes it viable — specialist depth can be held once and deployed wherever a reform demands it.

Four pillars describe what a transformation has to move: leadership; regulation and accountability; professionalisation; and strategic public finance. Together they produce an institution that is credible, financially and operationally, to those who decide where capital goes. Governments are not short of investment instruments; they are short of the standing that makes those instruments usable. Credibility unlocks investment, and investment absorbed by functioning systems delivers services that last.

Four capability areas serve that work. Systems leadership builds political commitment at the highest level and holds it there — Ghana's Presidential Compact commits USD 1.7 billion a year to 2030. Strategic advisory turns commitment into architecture: costed national financing strategies, Ethiopia's endorsed in 2025 and Rwanda's under way. Institutional strengthening makes diagnosis operational, through our nine building-block framework, 56 district master plans now used as national planning instruments in Uganda and Ghana, and the professionalisation of service provision. Research underpins all of it, published openly, including when it unsettles our own assumptions.

Our Netherlands member has taken on part of what this requires of the North: working with the Dutch ministry and European institutions on how cooperation is designed, so that it strengthens national systems and national authority rather than working around them. Two billion people still lack safe drinking water. That number moves when nation builders put delivery at the heart of national agendas, and when organisations rooted in those countries are there to build what makes delivery possible.

We launch Riva in Kigali, at the Africa Water & Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium 2026, co-convened by AMCOW and the Government of Rwanda, 17–21 August. The name is new. The ambition it answers is bigger, to transform the lives of people, for the better, for all of us.