Monitoring Millennium Development Goals for Water and Sanitation: a review of experiences and challenges

Updated - Thursday 23 June 2005

Kathleen Shordt, Christine van Wijk, François Brikké (2004)

In September 2000, 147 heads of state and governments, and 189 nations in total, committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs stand for a renewed commitment to overcome persistent poverty and address many of the most enduring failures of human development. Halving ‘by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation’ is one of the targets defined for achieving these MDGs.

In the water supply and sanitation sector, monitoring progress towards achieving the MDG targets is essential for maintaining and putting into practice the political commitment both of national governments and the international community. However, background information on the water supply and sanitation sector remains unsatisfactory; and the reliability of existing statistics is uneven.

The ‘IENA Group’, an informal donor group which was convened at the invitation of the World Bank, has expressed the need to review existing global monitoring with a view to developing simple, practical and accepted systems that provide key actors with core information needed to take informed decisions. As a contribution, this review of existing MDG monitoring efforts has been commissioned by the German development cooperation and carried out by the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. This volume provides useful insight into how the MDGs are monitored for water and sanitation. It identifies challenges that need to be addressed and then formulates recommendations for further action.

Please note that this publication is only available electronically. Two documents are available: one is a pdf of the book as printed and one is a copy of the book in word.