Mapping and Monitoring for Sustainable WASH Efforts

Dear Partners, 

The more developed our programs become, the more we consider how the information our programs generate can better support asking key and critical questions around our success. What impact has our programs had in the communities we serve? How different is the state of WASH in these communities after one, two or three years of our organization’s presence? And perhaps one of the more pressing questions: How sustainable is the work we have done up to now? Brace yourselves! This is edition of the Technical eUpdates is a long one dedicated to explore this topic that is emerging with great priority in the WASH sector.

These questions must be answered by more than just intuitive hunches or anecdotal testimonies from beneficiaries. Don’t get me wrong. These do have value, however gauging the likelihood of truly sustainable efforts requires hard data to estimate. This is why In the past year a lot of our conversations have shifted around data and information use. The Tech Summit earlier this year was a starting point of many initiatives to follow that aim to strengthen your skills and systems to better harness and use data for these critical questions as well as other monitoring and evaluation priorities. 

Within the WASH sector much work has been conducted around mapping of water points, using ICT and other electronic processes to determine the state of water access and even long-term functionality of previous investments in WASH. Other strategies and toolkits have been developed for monitoring and documenting learning around both successes and failures in WASH programming as platform to have more meaningful and evidence based discussions on what sustainability in WASH can be defined as.  The following resources have been compiled as a starting point to dig deeper into this realm of information driven monitoring. Links and pdf documents are provided. The diverse selection of papers, tools, technical briefs and case studies below aim to create a broader understanding on the processes that support conducting mapping or other monitoring efforts and how the outcomes can be analyzed to disseminate and use. 

Mapping of Water Sanitation and Hygiene Sustainability Tools: 

Premature failure of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure and poor service levels experienced by end users has resulted in an increasing emphasis on sustainability amongst development partners in recent years. Partly as a response to these challenges, a number of organizations have invested in and developed tools to help understand and improve services. Recognizing the need to promote and disseminate knowledge and good practice about the ‘how to’ of improving WASH sustainability, the Triple-S project1 managed by IRC, has undertaken a number of activities aimed at making such information and tools more accessible. This report contains the findings of a mapping of tools currently in use, as well as the outcomes of a survey looking into demand: in short assessing the current state of the market for sustainability tools and identifying the gaps. 

This working paper presents the results of both supply and demand assessments of a range of tools and complements an earlier Triple-S working paper that focused on five tools used by development partners to assess programmatic sustainability (Boulenouar et al., 2013). The information presented in this and the previous working paper was the subject of a two part webinar series3 hosted by Global Water Challenge (GWC), WASH Advocates, Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN), IRC, and Aguaconsult in March 2014.

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Water Point Mapping: Indicators, pump functionality, accuracy of GPS, using and sharing data:

The mapping topic was created in August 2012 and has rapidly established as a strong visible element of the rural water supply network. The main component of the mapping topic is the Dgroups platform, which enables members to discuss technical, policy and management issues around water point mapping, monitoring and reporting. Members share data, analysis, insight and knowledge from mapping activities including the indicators, approaches, methodologies, technologies, and mechanisms for sustaining inventories. The group works towards making data available and accessible to all stakeholders, developing the environment where data can be used to inform resource allocation and planning decisions, and monitoring the improvements in equitable and sustained access to rural water supply.

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Failure and the Future

The fourth and final webinar in the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) Water Point Mapping series provided a candid account of the challenges with WPM that have led to failed objectives. There are, however, valuable lessons to be learned from those failures, and the experiences have provided useful models and contributed to improved knowledge and data banks. The webinar also discussed the future of WPM, including new models and initiatives to maximize the benefit of data monitoring and improve information accessibility and transparency. The webinar took place on 18 November 2015.

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Unlocking the Potential of Information Communications Technology to Improve Water and Sanitation Services

This knowledge product is a summary of fndings from the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) Study “Unlocking the Potential of ICT Services in the Water and Sanitation Sector”. e study builds on and complements the World Bank’s Africa Regional Strategy (2011) as well as the World Bank Group’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Strategy (2012). It further complements the E-Transform Africa series, a collaboration between the African Development Bank, the World Bank and the African Union, which captures the existing use of ICTs in six sectors (agriculture, climate change, education, health, financial services, government) and two cross-cutting themes (regional trade and integration; ICT competitiveness).

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WASH in Schools Monitoring Kit

This package is designed to help address the WASH in Schools monitoring deficit at the national level. It is designed as a resource for WASH and Education professionals and practitioners to strengthen national monitoring systems and to improve the quality of monitoring at the project level.

The package consists of three modules:

• The EMIS module: a set of basic monitoring questions on WASH in Schools to be incorporated into national Education Monitoring Information Systems (EMIS), usually administered annually;
• The survey module: a more comprehensive set of questions, observations and focus group discussion guidelines for use in national WASH in Schools surveys as well as for sub-national, project level or thematic surveys;
• The children’s monitoring module: a teacher’s guide and tool set for the monitoring of WASH in Schools by students, including observation checklists, survey questions and special monitoring exercises.

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From Infrastructure to Services: Trends in Monitoring Sustainable Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Services

From Infrastructure to Services reveals important breakthroughs in country-led and country-wide monitoring of rural and small towns water supplies; ICT for monitoring sustainable service delivery; monitoring the finance needed for service delivery; monitoring for sanitation and hygiene; and building coherence in global–regional–national monitoring. It asks: does project monitoring emphasize donor rather than user accountability or is it a necessary stepping stone to better national WASH sector monitoring? The book presents a state of the art of strengthening monitoring water supply and sanitation in developing countries and is essential reading for program managers and policy makers in the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector, both in development agencies and government departments. It should also be read by researchers and students in the WASH sector.

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More to Come!