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Answer from Reymond Patrick: An efficient baseline survey will enable to plan a capacity building strategic plan and to identify both all the potential actors who could be integrated in the reinforcement plan and the beneficiaries to target.

Answer from Erik Harvey: Interestingly, we are finding that there is often some confusion about what to include in a baseline survey and what shoudl actually be termed formative research. Formative research is most often done at a higher level covering a broader number of communities across an entire district (e.g.) and is usually design to tell you more about the overall influencing factors that might add or detract from your work, what you can build on or utilise or what you might need to avoid or be wary of. It can also be designed to help you assess what has worked and what hasn't in the past and also what others might be doing in your space, how best to link your work for added value and impact.

The baseline survey, on the other hand, shoudl generally be much more focused to provide you with more detailed status-quo information, which as the other's have stated, helps you to plan in more detail. It should also generally be built of the back of the key performance monitoring framework that you have design for you project, so that you can easily measure your project's performance against these indicators from start to finish. You can, if necessary also use the baseline to help you validate some of the findings from the formative research which may have influenced your project design and tell you how relevant these might be in the specific target communties.

By separating out these two studies allows you to do a formative pieve of research once across a wider area of work and then allows you to keep your baseline much more focused and lighter (therefore quicker) for each community / sub-project.

But to respond directly to your question "how does a baseline strengthen capacities in WASH", I woudl say that this depends very much on how it is managed. You can do a baseline by contracting someone else to design it and do it, but then you learn very little. If you incorporate the implementing staff within the design and baseline study process, they will learn so much more than what the data is just telling them and that knowledge should lead to better project implementation.

Answer from Reymond Patrick: Erik has perfecly defined base line and its usefulness. The BL serves to measure the project progress from T0 to T1 and to quantify and qualify the results at any given time (t+1).

Indispendsable in monitoring and evaluation of projects, but also very useful in the design of new projects because the BL gives a picture of the situation before the project facilitating to assess the relevance of the strategy that caused the change.

In short, an initial BL eases a backwards in project time, to revisit the strategy, to refine or tune up the performance indicators for better results or to adapt this strategy to another project with similar contextual BL.

Answer from Ademola Adeagbo:
Baseline Survey is very critical in designing and implementing projects that have the objective of changing the status quo. There is need for a comprehensive baseline survey. The survey should have the intent of covering all aspects to be touched by the proposed project. These include, actors/stakeholders, spaces for participation/involvement and associated challenges, policy regime/environment, social, cultural and physical environment (depending on the nature of the proposed project), the existing state of the sector/issue of concern to the proposed project/programme, etc. The tools for data collectionn should be comprehensive enough to harvest critical information from various stakeholders that would have been determined through stakeholder mapping. The results of baseline survey will become useful in building and strengthening capacity because the following, among others, would have become clearer:

• expertise required

• additional trainning for existing staff;

• should be done to the policy and instituional framework aspect of the proposed study,

• type, quantum and quality of supports needed (funding, equipment, and other logistics)

• need for sectoral linkage and the nature of interaction

• types of indicators to be developed and how such should be measured from time to time (for Monitoring and evaluation programmes)

At the end of the project implementation, the baseline results also become useful in evaluating the level of progress. If progress level is not satisfactory, there might be the need to review many aspects of the project including the aspects of capacity building. This again might lead to further strengthening of capacity building.

With respect to WASH, experience from Nigeria has shown that weak capacity building is one of the major constraints. There is conflict between the WASH unit and the Works Department in Local Government Coucils; the WASH Unit is ill-equipped with respect to staff strength and quality; there is the case of poor logistics for embarking on monitoring and follow-up activities; the quality of facilitatiion of CLTS training is poor; there is inadequate space for NGOs to participate; among others. A baseline study is expected to reveal the maginitude of these problems and the findings will assist in seeking ways of strengtheing them such that this aspect of the project to be implemented will not constitute a constraint.