After 15 months, on June 13th Nathalie Seguin stepped down from her role as the End Water Poverty global coordinator, to continue her advocacy work towards the realization of human rights, supporting local and national initiatives in Latin America. Nathalie shares her experience with you in this farewell note.
“Following the visionary stewardship of the last two coordinators where End Water Poverty evolved into a global coalition, strengthening and deepening the relationships of solidarity, collaboration and support between our members, partners, and allies around the world, I have taken the coalition to the following and natural step, towards a stronger southern and member leadership. I guided the reflexions within the steering committee on decolonization and localization to unveil what could it mean for the work we do at the coalition and define under what values and principles we should act to achieve structural changes.
While undergoing this significant transition we have still managed to maintain active engagement within the coalition, fostering strong member relations, learning, and solidarity. I continue to lead EWP global advocacy for human rights realization by putting water rights-holders in front, and ensuring resources (80% of our unrestricted funds) are distributed to grassroots groups who are best placed to decide their own strategies and tactics. Funding our members to design and deliver context-sensitive, community-led campaigns has consistently produced exceptional results around the world. With Sam Taylor who led the CYWR Campaign we published an important report of 5 years of tangible and transformative impact of our Claim Your Water Rights campaign.
With the passion and strong belief of community-leadership, that has characterized my work at regional level, and the understanding that global work has to respect and be contextually sensitive for the local advocacy strategies, under my leadership, the secretariat with the support of the steering committee, we formalize the terms of references of the Campaign task team with the objective of keeping the campaigns well rooted to our members realities and in communication with the steering committee. This Task team will be untitled to participate in Steering committee meetings twice a year to guide on strategic lines relevant to local realities or disrupt inequitable systems of power that could deviate our coalition from its objective of keeping water and social justice at the centre of the coalition’s strategy.
When I just took the role, I had the mission to finish the policy brief resulting from #HearingTheUnheardHRWS campaign which I have been part of, and launch it. Together with multiple allies and partners, which shares first person testimony from marginalised groups globally, highlighting their agency and voices, and confronting the stigma and discrimination that keeps them marginalised, we edited video testimonies and printed the Leave No One behind policy brief that you can read in English, French and Spanish.
The policy brief was launched at the 10th World Water Forum in a session where the Special rapporteur and 2 representatives from indigenous people shared their perspectives in how human rights approach can help to bring access to safe water and sanitation to those people and communities that have been historically neglected form governments. The brief was intended to be presented at the People Water Forum but due to the intimidation, harassment and repression this event experienced, as EWP coordinator, we wrote a statement of solidarity and I looked for spaces within the WWF to denounce those terrible actions against the free will to meet and share experiences of violations and alternatives to achieve the Human rights to water and sanitation.
On our internal work, under our research agenda for advocacy strategy line, we finalized the LNOB policy brief resulting of a research but also proposed the following research as a recommendation of the testimonies: To strengthen community water management model. The LNOB and the next research were presented to our research benefactor who was very well satisfied with both. This next research, will contribute to a thematic that hasn’t much written. It will be divided regionally to give us information on how this model works in each region, focusing on the role of women and other discriminated communities have on them, it will identify the differences of other models such as self supply that only benefit one interest, and will stress on the local government role and responsibility with those models particularly on quality of water and sanitation systems.
Fundraising became the main priority to include in the role of the next global coordinator, for which I helped to develop the terms of references for the post and those of our new Fundraising Task Team, that will have to be activated as soon as the new coordinator is hired. All members are in. The expansion of the secretariat with regional co-coordinator, increase our grants to support our members under a multi-anual mode is most needed.To achieve this we will need to diversify our donors, which under the global context could seem a mayor challenge but I am convinced that EWP coalition is very well positioned to interest new donors.
Finally, I closed my term as Global coordinator by publishing the progress report 2022-2024. I have expressed my recognition for the support that the Steering committee gave me in this period, and our End Water Poverty’s Steering Committee Chairperson Ojobo Ode Atuku who will also finalize her term end of June, said in her last Steering committee meeting: “On behalf of End Water Poverty’s Steering Committee, I thank Nathalie Seguin for her contributions, Nathalie immediately stepped up and was able to hold the secretariat. And within this period, she has also been able to establish an external relationship and engagement, even in areas where we have not earlier on, been active and brought a lot of visibility to EWP as well. And the external focus of our work has really been great, and I really must commend Nathalie on that and appreciate the selflessness and passion with which he brought to the job.”
I trust the new coordinator will follow up with the work that the last 3 coordinators have done towards the consolidation of a southern led coalition, and with the guidance of the Roadmap 2025-2030 will be able to put in place a strategy for the following years and fundraise to keep up with our aims and expectations for this coalition. Please keep an eye on our newsletters for our next call for mini-grants to members to support diverse, context-specific actions through the #ClaimYourWaterRights campaign, which should be announced in September this year.”