In this edition of Team Speak, Ashraful reflects on the value of slowing down, listening carefully, and creating space for shared ownership. Whether navigating fragmented funding flows or reworking tools that missed the mark, his approach reminds us: sometimes the smartest fix isn’t pushing harder, but rethinking how we build — and who we build with.
Read on to see how thoughtful problem-solving can shift outcomes, one pause at a time.
Ashraful (A): One moment that stands out from our ongoing WASH-related work in Bangladesh is tied to a study focused on understanding the impacts of inaction on children and women. The aim was to quantify the economic and social costs of inadequate WASH access by linking fragmented datasets across funding flows, service coverage, and public health outcomes. Alongside this, we were tasked with evaluating the existing funding landscape and estimating the investment needed to deliver safely managed WASH services nationwide. This is a first-of-its-kind effort in Bangladesh — offering a new lens to understand how WASH systems and investments connect.
The most difficult part? Tracking the funding. The data was scattered across institutions — inconsistent, incomplete, and riddled with gaps. Many organizations don’t make their WASH-related funding information public, and internal policies often limit access to critical details like budget size, timelines, geographic scope, or even the split between hardware and software interventions. This lack of disaggregated, up-to-date data — especially by population group, service level, or region — made estimating demand and cost incredibly difficult. We were left asking: How do we build a coherent, defensible narrative from data that resists coherence?
Rather than relying on assumptions or general proxies, we doubled down on triangulation. We conducted targeted interviews with government stakeholders, donor agencies, DFIs, and implementation partners. We reviewed national WASH accounts, budget documents, climate and gender-sensitive WASH reports, and tapped into Athena’s internal experience base. This layered approach helped us bridge information gaps and build credibility into our funding assessment.
Crucially, triangulation helped us link funding data to outcome-level indicators, such as child malnutrition, school dropout rates, and healthcare costs — within the cost of inaction framework. This brought sharper focus to the real-life risks of underinvestment and helped us make the case for why investing in WASH systems, particularly for women and children, matters.
What helped me in this process was my ability to listen carefully; not just to what was said, but what wasn’t. I leaned on the guidance of seasoned colleagues at Athena and drew from comparative literature to resolve data issues. In the end, this effort helped us complete a robust landscape and costing analysis — one that my colleague Shivkumar Mulay used to develop a powerful narrative about what smarter, better-targeted investments could achieve.
(A): If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working across multidisciplinary teams, it’s that good problem-solving isn’t just about assembling the right expertise but about creating space for different perspectives to interact, challenge each other, and co-create. That collaborative tension is often where real innovation begins.
One project that brought this home was a global hygiene-related gender monitoring study, conducted with an academic institution. Our role was to adapt complex cognitive interview and survey protocols for use in Bangladesh. This wasn’t just a technical challenge — it was deeply contextual. We needed regional and demographic representation while factoring in local realities of WASH access, especially from a gender-sensitive lens. And we had to do it quickly, under tight timelines, while navigating IRB approvals, field-testing, and tool development for digital data collection.
The real test came when our original survey tools simply didn’t land. Early field tests showed that participants didn’t connect with the language or format — the instruments felt distant from their lived experience. Rather than to push forward, we paused and opened up the conversation. We brought together research leads, field enumerators, data analysts, and even the Communications team for open debriefs.
That reset: opening up space for wider input changed everything. What followed was a simplified, localized version of the tools that held onto research integrity while connecting more clearly with the people we were engaging with.
It wasn’t just a technical fix — it was a collaborative redesign rooted in shared ownership. That experience changed how I think about team dynamics. Often, the best solutions come from those closest to implementation — and they surface when feedback is timely, honest, and inclusive. True progress happens when teams don’t just divide tasks, but co-own the problem and the path forward.
