A key to improving performance and sustainability
To ensure water and sanitation services that last, monitoring must:
- focus on the level of services provided over time (rather than coverage or facilities),
- be a part of a national system (rather than be limited to isolated project efforts to ensure targets are met),
- support planning and remedial actions (rather than stop at the level of reporting with little or no follow-up).
Most countries are moving in this direction - working towards building strong national monitoring systems that enable better planning and maintenance of WASH services. The adoption of ICT's has helped by bringing the costs of data collection and analysis down and making it easier to share information.
Tools & guidance
IRC is working to support the development and expansion of national WASH monitoring systems in Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia and Honduras, and as a part of this work is developing tools and guidance on:
- Developing or strengthening a national monitoring system - helping stakeholders to define the purpose of monitoring, indicators, institutional arrangements and financing mechanisms;
- Defining indicators to measure service levels for water and sanitation and the performance of service providers and authorities;
- Selecting appropriate ICT platforms and tools; and
- Defining institutional arrangements for monitoring - determining roles and responsibilities as well as the information flows between different actors involved in collecting, analysing and using monitoring data.
Resources
