Reflections and learnings: navigating from safely managed WASH to climate resilient WASH

This 'Dive deeper' series give readers a chance to learn more from Water for Women's experience and should be read in conjunction with our more detailed Impact Report.

The UNICEF/WHO Joint Monitoring Program (JMP):  Sustainable Development Goal 6 sets targets for every person to access safely managed water and sanitation by 2030. Currently, 3.5 billion people lack access to safely managed sanitation and 2.2 billion lack access to safely managed water. The UNICEF/WHO Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) was established (2016) to monitor progress against SDG 6 and track the quality of services being provided.  One of its key focusses was to identify inequalities in service levels between rural and urban, sub-national regions, rich and poor and other population groups where data exists. The JMP ladder clearly defines the characteristics of each level of service – safely managed, basic through to limited and unimproved (https://washdata.org/monitoring).  It also incorporates WASH in schools, health care facilities, as well as menstrual health.

JMP-defined safely managed services. Providing safely managed services that meet the JMP criteria is difficult. For water supply, JMP requires water to be available on premises as needed and free from contamination. For sanitation, JMP requires an improved toilet, not shared with other households, with excreta safely stored and treated either on or off site.  By way of example, safely managed services are particularly rare in Pacific countries. So low is the prevalence that there is currently no JMP[1] estimate for safely managed water or sanitation in the Pacific.

Understanding of and reporting on JMP service levels improved over the duration of WfW but remained quite variable. Not all partners were experienced WASH agencies, and some were engaging with JMP monitoring indicators for the first time. WfW’s Phase 1 Learning Agenda included a theme on safely managed services, which encouraged projects to deepen their understanding of definitions and how services could reach the safely managed standard.

Some partners, even after submitting a case study for that theme, were unable to report successfully on basic or safely managed indicators. Even in the final round of Extension Phase reporting, several partners erroneously reported public tap stands as access to safely managed water (under JMP, household-level provision is required). Other partners had a strong grasp of the concepts and engaged in thoughtful analysis of how to apply them.

For example, while the JMP sanitation definition allows for unopened pits to be considered safely managed (until they are full and overflowing), several WfW partners recognised that sanitation without FSM is not safe. They only counted toilets as safely managed where there was a mechanism to treat faecal sludge on site (such as dual pits) or commercial emptying services were available. These partners recognised that in this case good quality WASH programming can exceed current JMP safely managed standards. The spectrum of understanding, interpretation and implementation of JMP standards displayed in WfW was illustrative of that in the broader WASH sector.

Intersections between climate resilient and safely managed services. Achieving safely managed WASH requires improving the quality of services, which in many ways is complementary to increasing climate resilience. Within WfW, however, the pivot to climate resilience in the Extension Phase reduced the emphasis on exploring safely managed WASH. The focus shifted to developing an understanding of what constituted climate-resilient WASH in different contexts, without a conscious mapping of how the 2 concepts overlapped.

JMP definitions of safely managed services focus on service outcomes.  For water supply, for example, the JMP definition requires that the service provides water as required; this implies that services are available year-round, without interruption. A service that is seasonally intermittent or breaks down intermittently due to poor maintenance does not meet the JMP definition. For sanitation, JMP criteria require that excreta is contained safely. Toilets that release faecal matter when flooded do not qualify as safely managed.

Climate resilience partially intersects with these ideas, but improving resilience will not deliver safely managed services. Within WfW’s Extension Phase, for example, some projects supported drilling of community boreholes to access groundwater to supplement household bores or rainwater tanks. This made water supply more resilient, but not safely managed (because services were not connected to each household). In Nepal, SNV’s project in the Terai took a step further, funding a demonstration system that connected a new deep bore to an overhead tank and piped supply to each household. This combined safely managed water supply with increased climate resilience. For sanitation, iDE’s all-seasons upgrade toilet worked in a similar way. It treated sludge and effluent to achieve safely managed sanitation and improve climate resilience in areas where flooding was likely to increase due to a high water table.

There is an implicit incentive in JMP standards to improve the quality and sustainability of WASH services. These contribute to climate resilience without that being the primary objective. Seasonally variable sources or poorly maintained systems that fail regularly are not consistent with safely managed water supplies. In this sense, safely managed criteria and climate resilience overlap. However, there is no explicit requirement in current JMP criteria to consider future risks whereas for climate resilient WASH the starting point is to assess the climate risks. The definition for safely managed sanitation provides a good example; a simple pit toilet that is almost full and might overflow next week meets the safely managed definition if it has never been opened. Similarly, a water supply that is safely managed today may be based on over-extracted groundwater or on rainwater harvesting that will fail as rainfall reduces in the future or becomes more variable. These safely managed systems don’t reduce climate risks, and WfW would not consider them climate resilient.

Challenging sustainability. Increasing technical complexity can undermine sustainability and hence reduce climate resilience. In this aspect, pursuit of safely managed services could be a barrier to climate resilience in some circumstances. Water supply systems that deliver water to every household require more maintenance than simpler systems serving communal tap stands. They may also require pumps in the distribution network. Providing safely managed water can also involve treatment to remove contaminants, again increasing technical complexity and management requirements. Similarly for sanitation, septic tanks are more difficult to manage than simple pit toilets, and services to extract and treat faecal sludge require operating expenditure and management. If these systems are more susceptible to breaking down, they may be less climate resilient than JMP basic services (despite such systems also requiring maintenance).

Basic or safely managed. In most of the settings where WfW worked, access to even JMP basic services is very low and is a critical development need. Taking the quantum step from no service to safely managed services would require an enormous increase in government WASH investment that is unrealistic in the immediate future. Rather than pursuing safely managed services, in these settings WASH agencies may see greater development benefit in promoting universal access to climate-resilient basic WASH services as their first priority. Equity and the human right to water and sanitation demands such an approach. WfW has provided partners with a sound basis for considering this issue in their various project contexts and building that experience into future programming. 

Monitoring climate resilience. JMP is currently considering the issue of climate-resilient WASH and how it can best be defined and integrated into a set if monitoring indicators. WfW’s experience highlights many of the challenges of this issue. Partners are using their experience to engage in the JMP discussion, especially ISF through its role in supporting UNICEF and WHO to review the JMP definitions to explicitly consider climate resilience.

During the Extension Phase WfW was working through its understanding of climate-resilient WASH. The climate-resilient WASH indicators developed at the outset of the Extension Phase, when understanding of the concept was emergent, were simple and did not capture the complexity of the climate integration process.  It was optimistic to expect the development and trialling of meaningful indicators that monitored climate-resilient WASH outcomes during the 2-year timeframe. However, WfW does illustrate several aspects that might be helpful to the JMP review committee as they revise standards, including examples of the varied natured of how JMP standards were interpreted and monitored across the CSO projects, lessons around transitioning to climate-resilient WASH programming, and the large challenge of leaping straight to safely managed services (bypassing the basic standard) in many contexts.