Ton Schouten, Director of IRC’s Triple-S initiative presented the keynote paper at the First Consultation on Developing post-2015 Indicators for Monitoring Drinking-Water and Sanitation in Berlin, held during 3-5 May and organised by WHO and UNICEF.
Published on: 01/07/2011
As the first ever consultation regarding post-2015 monitoring of water and sanitation, the event was well-linked to IRC's committed focus on advocating for "sustainable services at scale". Amongst a group of 60 high level professionals in the sector were representatives from UN organisations, the Banks, and international networks and knowledge centres. IRC's attendance and central participation at the event indicated our strong role as a thought leader on service levels and pro-poor and country led approaches.
Based on the paper- “Taking a service delivery approach to monitoring water supply in low income areas and implications for the Joint Monitoring Programme”, which was co-authored by Catarina Fonseca (Director of IRC’s WASHCost project) and Patrick Moriarty (IRC Ghana Country Director), Ton presented the latest thinking as well as promising examples of how to address the need for a change in monitoring practice. He also posed questions on the future role of the Joint Monitoring Programme in supporting this change.
Water supply in low-income areas needs to shift the focus from building new hardware, to a new focus on providing sustainable services. To support this shift, monitoring practices will also have to move from tracking coverage (the number of systems built and users who have access) to tracking services delivered at an agreed level of quality over time. At the moment, monitoring is conducted via two approaches: 1) sample based surveys which in turn shape policy and decision making, as well as international comparisons; and 2) using service provider data for management purposes. Though both are integral to achieving good governance and improved service delivery, both need to be adjusted to take into account the actual service delivered.
Guy Hutton, Senior Economist at the World Bank, also agreed with this line of thinking as he stated that:
“Since the milestone year of 2010, the question of what will happen after 2015 is increasingly asked. Monitoring progress towards the current target is based solely on the use of facilities and does not take into account other important parameters, such as the drinking-water quality, the overall availability of adequate quantities of water for domestic use, the distance to a water source or sanitation facility, the time members of a household spend on access and use of sources and facilities, the number of hours the service is available, social obstacles to access for certain population groups, maintenance of the infrastructure, whether excreta are safely disposed of, or whether the services and facilities are affordable. For the people for whom they are intended."
The next question then lies in the fact that if universal coverage was an elusive goal to reach when it was set in the 1980s, and is also seemingly difficult to achieve within the term of the Millennium Development Goals; then we as a collective WASH sector are still unclear of what the target(s) should be after 2015.
A possible answer to this particular dilemma regarding setting post-2015 targets has come from the human rights community, wherein governments should not aim to solve the drinking-water and sanitation situation overnight, but rather make tangible progress towards the realization of this human right, as outlined in the Human Rights Framework prepared by the United Nations General Assembly in July 2010.
