Annual Report on Global Indicators for Sanitation and Water for All

Annually, Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) produces a report on progress in their partner countries, in line with the results framework. This year, we were asked to support in the analysis of the high-level outcomes, which include financial, political, and institutional indicators. We used secondary sources (e.g. GLAAS, OECD) as well as internal databases to perform analyses. The final report will also include status updates for intermediate outcomes and outputs.

On these high-level indicators, there were several notable improvements for SWA countries in 2022. The number of Nationally Determined Contributions of the Paris Agreement linked to SDG 6 were increased from 860 in 2020 to 1261 in 2022. Furthermore, the proportion of Mutual Accountability Mechanism (MAM) commitments achieved rose from ~4% in 2021 to ~9% in 2022. For data sources that are not updated annually (like GLAAS), we were unable to give an estimate of progress in 2022.

This project builds on previous work Nicolas did to develop the SWA country profiles (find an example here). The country profiles use data from a number of sources, including JMP, UNICEF, World Bank, UNDP, UNDRO, UNISDR, EMDAT, ND-GAIN, GLAAS, and others.

Keep an eye out: the SWA Annual Report is yet to be published on their website!

Tracking global progress on water, sanitation, and hygiene in ‘One for All’ Focus Countries – a collaboration between WASHNote, IRCWash and Water for People

One for All Global Landscape

IRC and Water For People have recently joined forces as ‘One for All‘. IRC and Water for People have jointly developed a strategy for their work in water, sanitation, and hygiene systems change at local, national, and global levels. The Results Framework contains metrics for each level of work; globally, they seek to facilitate transformational change in how services are provided around the world.

Together with IRC and Water for People, we recently completed a report on the status of 24 global landscape indicators – a set of indicators looking at a range of themes, including the population with access to at least basic services, the spread of access between wealth quintiles, financial commitments and disbursements, political will, and institutional capacity, amongst others. The report aims to highlight the progress and current status of One for All Focus Countries, which include: Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, Tanzania, Rwanda, Malawi, Uganda, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, India and Bangladesh. Nonetheless, these are compared to regional and global averages as well. All analyses will be repeated in future years in order to document progress over time.

Looking at secondary data sources: JMP, OECD and others

We used secondary data sources like GLAAS, the UNICEF/WHO Joint Monitoring Program (JMP), OECD, and Sanitation and Water for All (SWA). Further building on the work of the jmpwashdata data science library, which is now available for use, we were able to creatively visualize the number and proportion of people which have access to WASH services. This was done not only for the most recent data (2020), but also projected into the future based on the Annual Rate of Change (ARC) to be able to present a possible scenario for 2030. See the figure below:

We also further disaggregated these findings depending on wealth quintiles, boding very interesting (albeit shocking) results. For example, we projected that in Ethiopia approximately 33 million people in the lowest two wealth quintiles will still lack access to basic drinking water. This equates to over half (~56%) of the population in these wealth quintiles, but less than a quarter of the total population (~23%), indicating severe disparities in equity which should be adequately addressed. However, it is important to note that the data quality for JMP’s inequality spreadsheets is not as strong as the global dataset. The figure below shows the spread of data quality for the countries we assessed, based on the JMP’s country inequalities files.

Similarly, OECD data on Aid Commitments and Disbursements for WASH was downloaded and is now available as an R package and CSV file. We found that both commitments and disbursements seem to fluctuate over time, but that there is no clear trend.

Based on these analyses, some next steps include developing clear targets for each indicator, and also supporting focus countries in reaching these goals.

References

Dickinson, N. 2021. jmpwashdata: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme Water and Sanitation Data. R package version 0.1.4.

GLAAS. 2021. UN-Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water Data Portal. https://glaas.who.int/glaas/data

OECD-CRS. 2023. OECD Creditor Reporting System.
https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=CRS1

WHO/UNICEF. 2023. WASH Data. https://washdata.org/data/downloads#WLD

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