Maarten Blokland

Biography

Maarten Blokland, MSc, is partner with Water Partner Foundation and consultant in water services management. He is also owner of Blokland Advisory Services, a company registered under Dutch law. He has a Masters Degree in Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Delft. He has worked in the water supply and sanitation sector since 1975, and worked in more than 40 developing and newly industrialized countries.

He was Associate Professor in Water Services Management at UNESCO-IHE until his retirement in 2014. At the Institute he was Head of the Sanitary Engineering Department (1996-2000), Vice-Rector Education (2000-2003), Acting Director (2003-2004) and Deputy Director (2004-2007) and lately Head ad interim of the Department of Management and Institutions (2011). Prior to joining UNESCO-IHE in 1984, he worked 5 years with a water utility and 4 years with a consulting engineering firm. His present work is on the management of water utilities with a focus on (pro-poor) benchmarking, participatory project development, and capacity development for improved performance of water services providers.

Maarten Blokland has experience in setting up and executing capacity development (CD) activities abroad, including needs assessment, development and implementation of CD interventions, and the training and coaching of capacity builders and their organisations. He has been engaged in the formulation, monitoring, review and evaluation of water and sanitation projects. His educational activities concern the development and teaching of professional and postgraduate courses in water services management. His research focuses on benchmarking for pro-poor water services provision, and performance assessment and capacity building for water utilities. His work has resulted in a considerable number of publications, among which are ''Private Business, Public Owners - Public Shareholdings in Water Supply Companies'' (1999), "Capacity Development for Improved Water Management" (2009), "Benchmarking Water Services Delivery" (2010), and ''Towards Sustainable and Equitable Water and Environmental Services Delivery: Capacity Development for Multiple Stakeholders from 11 Towns around Lake Victoria'' (2012).

Maarten Blokland was a Governor of the World Water Council, Member of the Bureau and Chairman of its Commission on Legal and Financial Affairs. He was the Co-ordinator of the Institutional and Managerial Options Working Group of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, Member of the GWP Nominations Advisory Committee, Member of the Management Team of the UNDP-associated Cap-Net Project, and Member of Board of Delft Cluster, a virtual research organisation composed of seven applied research institutes in the Netherlands.

Prior to joining IHE he was a Senior Consultant with IWACO, an international consulting engineering firm based in the Netherlands. During his four years with the firm, he was involved in the preparation of engineering proposals, feasibility studies and detailed designs and implementation for water supply and sanitation projects.

Before that, Maarten Blokland worked five years with the Water and Sewerage Board in Swaziland, posted there first by the United Nations Volunteers, and then jointly by the Governments of Swaziland and The Netherlands. For two years he was in charge of the design section, and for the next three years he was responsible for the physical and financial planning and monitoring functions of the Board. At that time, the Board was responsible for water supply and sanitation in 16 designated urban areas with populations between 500 and 30,000 inhabitants and provided technical support to 150 rural water supplies on an agency basis.