Monitoring Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation:
Moving Beyond 2015, Preparing the Next Generation of Indicators

Thursday 21 August
Afternoon Seminar

Convenors: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), United Nations Secretary General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation (UNSGAB), United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), Water and Sanitation Programme (WSP), UN-Water, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany (BMZ), Department for International Development, United Kingdom (DFID), Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI)

Event Summary and Conclusions

The seminar was built around a joint presentation from the co-convenors and presentations of country monitoring experiences. It gave an overview of global and national monitoring systems and identified priority actions to achieve more comprehensive sector monitoring. 

Major challenges addressed in the seminar included: (i) MDG Target 7c indicators currently do not cover all key aspects of the target, (ii) reported coverage for the same country often differs according to sources and (iii) differences between urban and rural realities need to be addressed.  It was recognized that progress in sector monitoring has been made since the 2007 Forum, especially at the global level. Opportunities for additional strengthening were identified, including the use of information technology, the complementary use of data from service providers and household surveys, exchanges between practical monitoring experiences and the preparation of support programs (e.g.  the Pan African Framework for Water Monitoring and Evaluation presented by the African Water Facility). 

The co-convenors recommended priority actions: compare and align international and national processes (i) to harmonize national definitions and (ii) to maximize coherence between national and global monitoring; extend the disaggregation of data; learn from the differences between data sources; fine-tune household surveys; include water quality and disposal and treatment of wastewater in national monitoring; encourage citizen monitoring of services; promote regional monitoring of regional commitments; improve interagency dialogue, coordination and cooperation; and develop country monitoring capacity.

Experiences presented by Senegal and Madagascar showed practical examples of the importance of national data reconciliation to ensure better understanding and to develop harmonization between different national agencies and coherence with global monitoring.

In terms of the next generation of national monitoring, participants prioritized the following actions: (i) establish one monitoring plan, led by Government, (ii) harmonize and refine definitions, categories and tools, led by National Statistics Bureau (or equivalent), (iii) ensure a process to analyse and explain differences in results between different data sources, and (iv) establish a multistakeholder, national monitoring platform with clear roles and responsibilities.

Conclusions/Recommendations:  • Compare and align monitoring systems to improve sector understanding.  • Develop additional indicators to cover all aspects of safety and sustainability. • Broaden the scope of monitoring.  • Prioritize support for capacity building for sector monitoring. • Continue collaboration towards a new generation of WSS monitoring. 

Seminar Programme         13:30-17:00, Room T6

Co-Chairs: Mr. Gerard Payen, UNSGAB and Dr. Franz-Birger Marré, BMZ
Facilitator: Mr. Piers Cross, WSP

Presentation from the event

Moving Ahead in Monitoring Drinking Water and Sanitation - Joint Presentation

Developing strategic partnerships for improving data reliability in monitoring the water and sanitation sector - The case of Senegal

Water and sanitation Reconciliation data - The case of Madagascar

Pan African Assessment on
Monitoring and Evaluation of the
African Water Sector