Monitoring is a key factor for sustainability of water services delivery. Although many countries are taking steps to integrate monitoring into service provision, there are numerous challenges that need to be addressed, as was highlighted recently at the World Water Forum in Marseille.
Published on: 18/04/2012
Monitoring of water services delivery is a key factor for sustainability of water services. This was the theme of the monitoring and evaluation sessions at the 6th World Water Forum in Marseille in March 2012. It was observed that most approaches to monitoring focus on coverage measured in terms of numbers of systems built and people served. They seldom take into account the functionality of systems and their sustainability.
Showcasing experiences from 16 countries, the session emphasised that monitoring of water services is essential to reduce interruption in services, to improve financial stability and to enhance transparency in water management. It also results in better operation and maintenance (O&M) as well as reduced costs on systems.
To ensure sustainable water services, there are many factors that require monitoring including technical, institutional, environmental, economic and social issues as well as management, transparency and financing issues. Also it has to be clear who is in charge of monitoring; who is targeted by monitoring; what is the cost of monitoring; how and to whom are the monitoring results reported; and what kind of actions are taken from the findings.
Although many countries are taking steps to integrate monitoring into water services, there are numerous challenges that need to be addressed. Some of the key challenges are:
• Lack of comprehensive systems to capture data beyond just the number of sources
• Lack of standardised tools and methodologies
• Inadequate capacity for those involved in water service monitoring
• Unreliable data which never reflects the reality
The African Ministerial Council on Water (AMCOW) identified additional challenges as specific to Africa. These challenges were mainly to do with interventions which are project based and fragmented; absence of national frameworks for monitoring and evaluation; and monitoring efforts which mainly serve donor interests offering very little support to the sector. The commitment coming out of the session was that by 2020, more than half of the countries in each continent have organised, inclusive and reliable reporting mechanisms for water supply services in rural and urban areas.
"Our approach combines monitoring and support – all organisations that do monitoring of indicators also provide back-up support. We have set sector golden indicators and based on them we do the annual national sector performance reporting. For small towns and piped water schemes, we have regional systems which we call umbrella organisations. These are membership organisations comprising Water and Sanitation Service Boards (WSSB). These umbrella organisations carry out monitoring at regional level. We have designed a monitoring system and the indicators are all contained in there. The private operator does the information gathering and feeds it upwards until it reaches the ministry."
