Executive Summary

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) represent a renewed commitment to overcome persistent poverty and to address many of the most enduring failures of human development. The MDGs agreed by the international community in 2000 comprise 8 goals, 18 targets and 48 indicators. Water is interconnected with all eight MDGs and basic sanitation was added to the list at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Halving ‘by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation’ is one of the quantified and time-bound targets defined for the MDGs.

Monitoring progress towards achieving the MDGs in the water supply and sanitation sector is essential if the political commitment of the international community and national governments is to be maintained and put into practice. Monitoring information is also vital for advocacy, to promote the importance of water supply and sanitation issues in national policies and poverty reductions strategies. The need to monitor progress toward achieving the MDGs on water and sanitation has been widely acknowledged and numerous initiatives are under way. However, background information about this sector remains unsatisfactory and the reliability of existing statistics is being questioned. There is no general agreement about the instruments, methodologies or definitions that should be used for MDG monitoring at global, national or local level and no unified and harmonised system seems to have been established.

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 programs with a view to developing simple, practical and agreed systems that provide key actors with the core information they need to take informed decisions. Reliable information is needed to focus and scale political and policy reforms as well as to channel financial resources accurately. A core group has agreed to investigate the issue of monitoring the water MDGs. As a first step, this review of existing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts for MDG Water Supply and Sanitation has been commissioned by the German development cooperation and carried out by the IRC with the objective of mapping existing efforts, identifying challenges that need to be addressed and making recommendations for further action.

Two parallel and complementary efforts are currently being undertaken to monitor progress towards the MDGs. At a global level, the UN Statistics Division takes the lead in tracking progress. WHO and UNICEF have the major responsibility for providing the UN Statistics Division with relevant international statistics and analysis of quantitative and time-bound indicators directly linked to water and sanitation issues (target 10). This data is derived from the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), established in 1990 to make a global assessment of the water and sanitation situation. Since 2000, the JMP has relied exclusively on information collected through nationally representative household surveys, particularly, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), and the national demographic census. Data from the World Health Surveys may also be used in the future. Other relevant information is taken from assessment questionnaires completed by WHO country offices in liaison with local UNICEF staff and national government agencies.

At a national level, MDG monitoring is coordinated and supported by UNDP, in particular for the preparation of national monitoring reports. The main purpose of MDG country reports is not so much statistical monitoring as advocacy, public information and mobilization. While there is considerable variation among countries, the data base used for national MDG monitoring tends to be broader than for global monitoring and may include data from research institutions, censuses, administrative reporting systems and household based surveys.

MDG monitoring for water supply and sanitation is set in a wider framework involving other institutions central to the MDGs: the Millennium Project Task Force for Water and Sanitation and its monitoring sub-group, the UNDP-centred MDG Monitoring Teams and their related partner agencies in-country, the WSSCC Monitoring Task Force, and the Joint Monitoring Programme and its Technical Advisory Group. Any further development for MDG monitoring will need to involve these international platforms as core actors.

The Joint Monitoring Programme, which is generally seen as the main mechanism for monitoring progress towards the MDGs in this sector, serves as the international reference for achievements in water and sanitation. However, it has been widely acknowledged that a number of challenges for MDG monitoring are associated with the existing systems and processes. To address these challenges, the MDG Task force for Water and Sanitation and the JMP Technical Advisory Group are paying attention to key issues such as comparability of definitions, breadth or scope of terminology, baseline data, questionnaires and collection methods, data management and analysis, sampling, timeliness, relevance and usability and actual use.

It is felt that value could be added by complementary and supporting activities to promote a common and widely implemented yet flexible system specifically for MDG monitoring on a national as well as global level. Depending on the primary focus of the MDG monitoring, there are different points of entry for enhancing monitoring.

Complementary monitoring approaches developed on a pilot basis have addressed some of the inherent deficits and challenges of the systems currently being applied for MDG monitoring. These experiences can enhance monitoring by providing innovative approaches to sampling, data analysis and survey conceptualisation. Three relevant examples of complementary monitoring approaches are the monitoring of Vision 21, the Method of Participatory Assessment (MPA/QIA) which combines quantitative and qualitative data, and country monitoring by Water Aid with an equity perspective.

Recommendations

Based on the achievements of MDG monitoring for water supply and sanitation and the challenges, a number of recommendations for action have been formulated taking into account the interdependence of different challenges and points of entry. These recommendations attempt to balance a demand for comparability and uniformity with the need for flexibility given the number of actors, institutions and countries involved. The recommendations can be grouped into the following three categories:

A. Strengthening statistical capacities and monitoring effectiveness

• Strengthening national statistical capacity focusing on data gathering, quality of survey information, statistical tracking, and analysis.
• Improving the use of monitoring information by strengthening capacities to integrate the results of statistical analysis into policy, planning, resource allocation and subsequent monitoring.
• Making use of relevant experiences with monitoring by applying methodologies that focus on a wider range of variables such as access to service by the poor, management, functionality, behaviours and use of water and sanitation services, largely with a view to linking monitoring to action.

B. Coordination, Information Sharing and Cooperation

• Collaboration between programmes and projects at country level recognizing the PRSP is one of the platforms where MDG monitoring can be integrated and coordination and cooperation can be improved.
• Continued efforts to harmonize definitions and expand agreed indicators, while bringing together relevant stakeholders within a country to ensure relevance to the country situation, will facilitate MDG monitoring at national level and harmonize efforts.

C. Strengthening Global Monitoring and the JMP in particular

• Continued and enhanced support for international platforms to harmonize terminology and definitions and to ensure validity of monitoring, in particular, to move beyond just measuring access to improved facilities, towards measuring sustained access to safe water and sanitation.
• Enlarging the JMP team capacity, enriching its programme to act upon some of the preceding recommendations, and also the capacity of the JMP Technical Advisory Group, the UN Millennium Task Force and the WSSCC Task Force on Water and Sanitation.

This report has been made on the basis of a critical review of existing information accessible from the Internet (see references in Annex 1), the work of IRC and partners on monitoring and through participation in the WASH Week held in Geneva in December 2003. Interviews were held with the WSSCC Monitoring Task Force as well as with key JMP members.

A first draft of the report was presented and discussed at a workshop in February 2004 bringing together the core members of the IENA group on the issue of monitoring (BMZ, NORAD, AFD) as well as representatives of GTZ, KfW and IRC at the invitation of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

April 2004