Strengthening country-led water and sanitation services monitoring and data use for decision-making: lessons from WaterAid experience in four countries

Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) are fundamental human rights, of critical importance to health, education, wellbeing, and economic prosperity. To fulfil these human rights and drive progress towards universal and sustainable access to WASH services, government service-level monitoring processes and data use are vital for effective decision-making and accountability. Despite increasing sector efforts to improve WASH data access, there is limited evidence of this translating into effective data use to inform effective planning for equitable access and budgeting and of the factors affecting this. Four case studies where WaterAid has worked with national government and sector stakeholders to strengthen WASH monitoring processes in Uganda, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and Myanmar were analysed through an analytical framework to understand the impact of different factors and related system-strengthening activities towards outcomes of increased data coordination, timely and relevant data availability and data use to inform decision-making in WASH service delivery. The analysis highlighted that strengthening activities aiming at improving indicators, data collection and analysis, and the type of data collection and visualisation technology have a direct impact on improving WASH sector coordination and timely data availability. However, to ensure strengthening activities support data use for decision-making, they need to be developed from within and adapt to the on-going wider political economy systems evolution, including formal processes such as decentralisation and evolving informal political drivers.