Country-Led Monitoring

Are national WASH M&E system important for accountability and transparency?

When policy and the roles and responsibilities of service providers and government are unclear, it is difficult for users
and their representatives in civil society to advocate and tackle issues of accountability. Who is ultimately responsible for ensuring basic and safely managed WASH services? When these are clear with clear contractual arrangements, are there also agreed ways to measure and evaluate service performance? Who is measuring and communicating results? It is crucial to hold parties accountable for their actions and promises for this life sustaining services.

Sometimes civil society may fill the evidence gap with their own metrics. But government and service providers may choose to ignore the results on the basis that they are not ‘official’, ‘approved’ or even deemed to be ‘wrong’.

Establishing an information system is complex  and it requires clarifying a matrix of roles and responsibilities so that it is clear who is reporting what and why. Using and communicating results is an important step in holding sector stakeholders accountable .

Establishing a national WASH M&E system in a participatory approach is one way to develop consensus and ensure parties are all working towards the same goals to sustain services. Indeed, for change and improvement at all levels, there is a need to engage in dialogue around sector performance in WASH service delivery.

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One workshop to cover everything we ever complained about

This blog is co-written by Abdul Hafiz Koroma, Coordinator at the national WASH Secretariat, Ministry of Public Works, Liberia. The blog post has originally been posted on ircwash.org.

In December 2017, over 60 participants joined a workshop to validate an assessment of the national Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system in Liberia. During the workshop, the participants from national and sub-national level institutions became more and more engaged with Country-Led Monitoring (CLM) and seized the opportunity to influence the national M&E system.

The event by all measures was an eye-opener to many who had consistently framed monitoring through the reductive lenses of routine field visits alone. Monitoring both within central and local government coordination platforms has been subjected to weak regimes of “evaluation” and “reporting”. It appears that M&E has been reduced to isolated field visits that are not part of any programme evaluation. In the absence of “evaluation” reports, the goal of improving programme performance and achieving results remains elusive both at the project implementation level and the policy review and formulation strata. Monitoring should be seen as integral and a precursor to evaluation. It is a step towards project and programme appraisal and not an end in itself.

Country-Led Monitoring

In 2017, the Ministry of Public Works in Liberia led an assessment to make a snapshot of the current M&E system for rural water and sanitation. The process known as “Country-Led Monitoring” essentially charts a process that enables the Ministry and its partners to discuss and plan for an improved system for routine monitoring of services, thereby pushing better resource planning and coordination to improve WASH services.

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