WATER KNOWLEDGE NOTE Measuring What Works in Rural Water Toward a Set of Global Indicators Agreeing on a global core set of indicators that can be integrated into existing monitoring efforts or harnessed as a foundation for new monitoring efforts will improve the efficiency of the sector and still enable collection of locally relevant information. Over the past eight decades, the World Bank has played a critical role in supporting the development of rural water services and institutions, investing over $5.5 billion on projects in the past five years. Despite this massive investment, sustainability of these services has remained a challenge. Globally, approximately 25% of water points fail within the first four years.1 Worldwide, projects supported by the World Bank and development partners have generated significant amounts of data about rural water services. This information can play a role in understanding and developing © Dominic Chavez/World Bank solutions to current sustainability challenges. Further, evidence-based analysis can accelerate water access by enabling insights at all levels—from global policy levels down to local operations. Currently, each World Bank water project and study develops urban service providers in a given country, understanding rural their own unique monitoring frameworks, with only a few services may require harmonizing data from hundreds or even simple Core Sector Indicators in common. As a result, rural thousands of rural water services. This fragmentation of data water data are difficult to harmonize, and it has not been leads to three specific challenges: possible to bring together the data collected across the rural water projects by different agencies to learn about sustainability Planning, Implementation, and Monitoring: The lack of challenges at scale. Fragmented data limits measuring impact harmonized data increases the amount of resources required by countries, development partners, and other stakeholders, (both time and money) to plan, implement, and monitor each developing and implementing their own monitoring projects. Because finding and accessing relevant data is frameworks. The WASH Poverty Diagnostics2 implemented difficult, new data are constantly collected for project design in 18 countries also revealed the close correlation between and monitoring, even though data may already exist. In extreme poverty and lack of rural water services. These findings addition to the data collection itself, resources are repeatedly highlighted that reducing extreme poverty will require larger spent developing new monitoring frameworks from scratch. and more sustainable investments in rural areas. SIASAR,3 the Rural Water Monitoring System in Latin America, has been Research and Innovation: Beyond implementation, the lack successful in showing how harmonized data can help improve of a central repository severely hampers efforts to research, rural services in middle-income countries. learn, and innovate. The lack of standardized data means that researchers are forced to either use smaller, less representative The need to enhance the Development Agencies’ approach data sets, or carry out new data collection activities—both of to rural water data is a growing strategic imperative. which slow the progress of innovation and research in the sector. Standardized analysis of data is also impossible, requiring instead The return on this investment will be significant. Research can that analytical tools must be constantly developed to match be accelerated when researchers have easy access to clean data, different monitoring frameworks. This limits the use of data. allowing for unprecedented learning throughout the water sector. Project review can also be accelerated when practitioners Understanding Trends: The fact that rural water data are are able to access key information on the context of proposed not currently harmonized across country borders poses a programs using standardized information. Finally, project further set of unique challenges. To start with, the lack of implementation can be more efficient, as detailed data can be detailed global data makes it difficult to understand global used in planning processes to prioritize investments where they trends that transcend specific countries. Related to this can have the greatest impact. challenge, the lack of robust multinational data eliminates the possibility of benchmarking to identify “bright spots” Although the data required to accelerate rural water access and areas where tailored support is required. and harness the data revolution are being collected, and increasingly so, it remains too fragmented to use at scale. The inefficiencies noted above ultimately increase the costs Slight differences in formats and limited global data sharing of reaching universal access. Scarce resources are often spent architecture mean that data are difficult to share, harmonize, addressing the inefficiencies of fragmented data, rather than and use. Accelerating progress toward universal water access improving water services. In a resource-scarce environment, and achieving the SDGs will require a more sophisticated a lack of global metrics increases costs and reduces the use approach to rural data harmonization. of costly data that have already been collected. The lack of global metrics is holding back progress on the SDGs. Challenges Opportunity: Global Standard, Local In the urban context, the World Bank has demonstrated clear Flexibility leadership on improving the global evidence-base through the work of IB-Net.4 However, as is often the case, the rural The World Bank is proposing the global water sector sector has been left behind. Investing in data harmonization is implement global metrics that effectively balance national particularly urgent as the unique context of rural water services objectives and the global imperative to improve rural water exacerbates data challenges. While urban utilities may serve data. This approach recognizes that every country has unique millions of people under one service provider and one set of data, needs and capabilities related to rural water information. rural service provision tends to be much more decentralized. Among this diversity of needs, however, some information Rather than harmonizing data from a limited number of requirements are common across nearly all countries. WATER GLOBAL PRACTICE | MEASURING WHAT WORKS IN RURAL WATER 2 In these cases, where many countries are already collecting monitoring frameworks or existing global standards. Where similar data, the differences in data collection frameworks the information is not already being collected, evaluations are often the result of a lack of coordination rather than a have shown that these indicators and metadata can easily be meaningful need for diverse approaches. While every country integrated to ensure alignment and still enable stakeholders and stakeholder should collect data, they need to match the to monitor the information that is locally relevant. local context; there is a clear opportunity to make minor enhancements to monitoring frameworks to ensure that key Implementation Approach data can be shared and harmonized globally. Creating a global core set of indicators that can be integrated into existing A set of 13 indicators form a core set of metrics across four monitoring efforts or harnessed as a foundation for new levels of analysis: water point, household, service provider, monitoring efforts will improve the efficiency of the sector and service authority. Additional metadata at each level enable and still enable collection of locally-relevant information. the identification of this data in time and space. Moving As illustrated below, countries with existing monitoring forward, any Rural Water project that collects data at any of frameworks can simply integrate the Global Core Metrics these four levels will be encouraged to integrate the relevant for Rural Water Supply. In other cases, where no monitoring core indicators using the standardized approach. framework exists yet, these metrics can serve as a starting point for monitoring. Where existing indicators among the proposed core indicators already exist in widely adopted monitoring frameworks, such Core as the JMP tools, MICS, DHS, GLAAS, SIASAR, or WPDx, Country 1 Country 2 Country 3 Country 4 Metrics the indicators will be used in the same format. This  will reduce duplication and enable interoperability. This “collect- as-you-go” approach will ensure that future data collection, regardless of institution or government leading the collection, can be collected in a harmonized format and can contribute to global rural water learning.6 Next Steps As a first step, the Global Core Metrics for Rural Water Supply will provide a full set of guidelines to enable Rural Water Practitioners and clients to begin collecting data in a standardized way in its projects. Moving forward, the Global Core Metrics for Rural Water Supply could provide To make integration of these indicators as easy as possible, a platform for sharing data from different sources across the global indicators should be based on existing monitoring diverse stakeholders. This platform would be a flexible frameworks that are already in use. Following a World interchange, allowing data to come from different sources Bank review of 40 different existing rural water indicator and able to provide data directly to other platforms. frameworks from national and development partner project Information from different sources could be harmonized systems, a set of 24 existing indicators was identified as a into a single data repository, using the Global Core Metrics potential set of Global Core Metrics for Rural Water Supply.5 for Rural Water Supply as a framework. A subsequent review that piloted the proposed metrics across three countries in Africa with some of the greatest data These metrics will first be piloted throughout the World Bank’s collection challenges (Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Sierra Leone) own portfolio in partnership with external stakeholders, evaluated the proposed indicators in terms of feasibility and including governments and development partners. As the usefulness and further refined the list to 13 core indicators global dataset grows, the Global Core Metrics for Rural Water and 11 reference attributes. Supply initiative could provide tailored support to enable the The proposed indicators reflect what is already being collected use of the harmonized data  in planning, implementation, in many cases—either through common elements of national and monitoring efforts. WATER GLOBAL PRACTICE | MEASURING WHAT WORKS IN RURAL WATER 3 Annex A: Summary of All Indicators List of All Global Core Metrics for Rural Water Supply, by Survey: Household HH1. Percent of households using an improved drinking water source HH2. Percent of households that have water accessible within 30 minutes (total collection time) HH3. Percent of households reporting sufficient water available when needed HH4. Percent of household income dedicated towards water HH5. Percent of households with reliable water service HH6. Percent of households satisfied with overall water service supply Water Point WP1. Percent of water points at risk of E. Coli infection WP2. Percent of functional hand pumps in geographic area WP3. Percent of functional taps/ points of collection in geographic area Service Provider SP1. Percent of service providers that have carried out preventive or corrective maintenance in the last 12 months SP2. Percent of all households in service areas using water services SP3. Percent of service providers reporting availability of funds at the time of monitoring Service Authority SA1. Percent of service authorities providing support to rural water scheme operations in the last 12 months List of All Reference Attributes, by Survey: Service Provider RHH1. Presence of a legally established service provider RSP1. Staffing RSP2. Chlorination RSP3. Non-revenue water RSP4. Tariff structure RSP5. Financial management RSP6. Tariff collection efficiency RSP7. Source, catchment and water resource management RSP8. Complaints handling mechanism Service Authority RSA1. Service authority capacity RSA2. Presence of an information system NOTES 1. https://www.rural-water-supply.net/en/resources/details/787. 2. http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water/publication/wash-poverty-diagnostic. 3. https://www.siasar.org/ 4. https://www.ib-net.org/about-us/ 5. World Bank. 2017. “Toward a Universal Measure of What Works on Rural Water Supply: Rural Water Metrics Global Framework.” World Bank, Washington, DC. 6. In line with the Principles for Digital Development, the Addis Accord, and the World Bank’s work on the Data Revolution, all data collected in compliance with the Global Core Metrics for Rural Water Supply will be shared openly (based on open data best practices and World Bank guidance [https://spappscsec.worldbank.org/sites/ppf3/Pages​ /previewpage.aspx?DocID=18ec8892-2cd1-458f-8797-50a83313dcac]). 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