Ghana pursues a decentralised approach to monitoring rural water services

Published on: 16/03/2012

The Chief Executive Officer of the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA), Mr Clement Bugase has indicated Ghana is focusing on using a decentralized approach to monitoring rural water services.

Mr Bugase was contributing to the topic, Monitoring water services delivery: a key success factor for sustainability and water for all at the 6^th World Water Forum in Marseille France.

Mr Bugase explained CWSA has set up stand alone servers at all its regional offices across Ghana to collect data on water services from various local government areas. Adding, it is the expectation of the agency to develop a robust system that networks all the districts, municipalities and metropolitan areas to their respective regional servers and the regional servers linked to the national level.

He stated the key issue for CWSA regarding monitoring of water services is to decentralize both the collection and analysis of the data to the small town level.

“Our aim and objective is to achieve a more decentralized, a more robust data collection and monitoring system”, Mr Bugase said.

He joined panelists from 16 other countries to share experiences in monitoring sustained delivery of water services in small and peri-urban areas.

CWSA working through the Sustainable Services at Scale (Triple-S) Initiative has developed and incorporated service delivery indicators into its District Monitoring and Evaluation System (DiMES).

So far, baseline data from three districts (Akatsi, Sunyani West and East Gonja Districts) have been collected on a pilot basis using a set of service level and sustainability indicators developed.

It is the expectation of CWSA to scale up the data collection across all 170 districts, municipal and metropolitan areas in Ghana generate national level data for all stakeholders to have access to reasonable data.