Supporting progress in monitoring safely managed water and sanitation

Key lessons from case studies of several Water for Women partners across a variety of country contexts in Asia and the Pacific

By Freya Mills and Prof. Juliet Willetts, University of Technology Sydney Institute for Sustainable Futures

Recent reporting on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicates that many countries still lack adequate data to make estimates of the status of ‘safely managed’ water and sanitation services.¹ This is a particular challenge in Asia and the Pacific, with no estimates of safely managed drinking water for the three relevant regions and no estimate for safely managed sanitation in Oceania.  

Monitoring ‘safely managed’ water and sanitation services requires a broader set of methods and a higher level of skills than assessing access to basic services. In addition, approaches vary with facility type and other contextual factors which adds further complexity. Equally, there are strong imperatives to meet this challenge; to achieve the desired public health and environmental outcomes, it is crucial for countries to understand their progress in achieving safely managed services.

Water for Women supports universal access to water, sanitation, and hygiene for all  n the Asia-Pacific region through 20 water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) projects being implemented by civil society organisations (CSOs) and 13 research projects. These projects cover a range of objectives and contexts, and several have developed evidence and practice that can inform monitoring of safely managed services. Water for Women has compiled selected case studies by project partners on monitoring safely managed services in urban and rural areas across the region, including Solomon Islands, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bhutan and Papua New Guinea.

To inform efforts to improve monitoring of safely managed services in the region, consolidated key lessons from these case studies and workshops with Water for Women partners are shared below.

 1.    Core indicators may not adequately capture contextual factors that affect safely managed services

The Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), responsible for monitoring SDGs 6.1 and 6.2, has defined ‘safely managed’ services and developed core indicators to assess and compare national progress at a global scale. However, Water for Women experiences demonstrate the importance of considering how local conditions affect meaningful use of global indicators, and the potential for expanded indicators to usefully inform national, sub-national and program monitoring.

In addition, data collection must be tailored to the types of services, with monitoring methods and data availability varying, particularly for non-piped services. Decentralised or household level services such as onsite sanitation, household groundwater wells or rainwater tanks are common in the Fund partner program areas. The function of these services differs to those provided via centralised systems, requiring different methods, indicators and data sources. This requires additional household-scale data to be collected.

2.     Assessing the complexity, risks and resources for indicator selection

While additional and more detailed indicators can improve our understanding of the safety of water and sanitation services, consideration of broader data sources is needed to monitor this higher service level. Safely managed water indicators include assessment of water availability and testing of water quality. The sanitation indicator includes monitoring of excreta from the toilet all the way through to disposal These higher level indicators cannot rely on household questionnaires alone; additional methods and data sources are needed but are often unavailable. This complexity is highlighted in the data gaps in the monitoring of SDGs 6.1 and 6.2, as many countries are yet to develop methods to capture this higher service level.

In low-resource settings, given budget limitations, additional indicators need to be selected carefully to help balance effort, capacity and cost, and ensure that monitoring is not a time and resource burden.  Water for Women partners and researchers supported the identification of priority indicators relevant for the context and could test and refine these indicators and methods before making recommendations for scaling up. One approach was to use a risk-based assessment to inform monitoring priorities. For example, whether sampling point-of-use water quality was critical to assess health risks or which water quality parameters are necessary to monitor based on the likelihood and risk related to the source. These decisions must be based on sound understanding of the context.

Understanding of the context also helps to simplify monitoring. Given the local context, some partners identified that rural sanitation need not be complex. In rural areas where they work, emptying and treatment services do not exist, given the remoteness or difficult terrain, therefore the only feasible pathway for safely managed sanitation is storage in-situ. In this case, monitoring safely managed rural sanitation can be achieved through household surveys alone. Integrating a risk-based approach to monitoring, such as linked with water safety planning, is also useful to identify actions that can be taken based on the findings.

 3.     New skills and capacities are needed to support improved monitoring of safely managed services

Monitoring more complex aspects of water and sanitation service delivery, such as water quality or safe containment, requires new methods and additional skills. Capacity for monitoring safely managed services is often insufficient, particularly in low-resource settings. This challenge increases with the inclusion of indicators such as water quality, which requires additional training, materials, and effort to obtain data. The capacity of enumerators to accurately understand and assess aspects of safely managed sanitation is limited in some countries, often influenced by inherent beliefs in what is ‘good’ sanitation. For this reason, training is needed to clarify how safely managed services might differ from their beliefs.

‘Learning by doing’ is a common approach of Water for Women partners in building capacity. Involvement of local government or community representatives- such as the Women’s Union in Vietnam and community volunteers in India - in all phases of monitoring is important to build understanding of the methods and quality of data, and to learn from first-hand experience of the status of and obstacles to safely managed services. In addition, supporting and enabling local stakeholders to use the data to inform and improve service delivery increases demand and motivation to improve monitoring systems. Safely managed water and sanitation services involve a range of actors; clarification of roles and responsibilities is an important first step to identify data sources and allocate roles for ongoing data collection at scale.

Beyond these many contributions, other ways that CSOs and researchers can contribute to improved monitoring of safely managed services are:

• Help identify and translate JMP indicators to simple and robust indicators relevant to the local context based on practical experience and evidence
• Support coordination among stakeholders of definitions and indicators of safely managed services to build consistent and comparable data
• Adapt data collection tools to suit the context, including advocating for different tools where standard approaches do not fit
• Share practical tested approaches to monitoring that are scalable and can inform national guidelines, target setting, or national monitoring systems.

4.     What’s next?

Download the Water for Women case study report and synthesis, and join the webinar on monitoring safely managed water and sanitation services with our Asia-Pacific partners, JMP and Bappenas – the Indonesian Ministry of National Development Planning – on 30 March 2022.

The Water for Women synthesis of case studies brings together the practical experiences of several Water for Women partners in monitoring safely managed water and sanitation services across a variety of country contexts in Asia and the Pacific. By taking a WASH system strengthening approach, which is fundamental to the achievement of Water for Women’s overall objectives, partners used project-level monitoring or research processes to experiment and conducted specific activities to build national or subnational monitoring systems and data use practices.

Building awareness of safely managed services is critical to increasing the demand for improved monitoring systems. If stakeholders are not aware of the importance of safely managed services or the extent of monitoring gaps, they may be reluctant to commit to monitoring responsibilities, modify existing surveys or invest in expanded monitoring methods. Without this data, the issues of poor quality, availability or sustainability of services may not be evident.

As we move towards 2030, Water for Women partners, and others, can continue to assess gaps in national monitoring systems, identify priority indicators for particular contexts, test methods for data collection, and build capacity for monitoring and data use at national and local levels.