WASHNote provides services to to a wide range clients from governments to private sector and non-profit organizations in WASH, energy, and information and communication technology (ICT). Additionally, we work with partners to innovate new approaches and accelerate progress towards SDG 6.
Country-Led Monitoring
WASHNote works with governments to strengthen national and local monitoring and evaluation systems. We assess the current systems in place in multi-stakeholder processes and work together with governments to improve the performance of the system by optimizing stakeholder roles and responsibilities, resource distribution and data management and use.
Read more about our work on CLM here and the Country-Led Monitoring toolkit.
Using evidence
WASHNote also helps people and organizations think about their core goals and strategies and facilitates the development of effective policies, monitoring and evaluation systems so that evidence can be used to accelerate progress to those goals.
Read more about our latest work on M&E here.
We do quite a bit of tool development as well to structure information in organizations and processes. We also have experience working on offline and online data collection processes and automating data analysis.
Innovating with data
We focus on how people can use data to achieve results.
Development of data standards
Sharing and combining datasets remains difficult if datasets are organized and formatted different, resulting in the need for matching the datasets manually. Data standards unlock the potential of all data gathered. WASHNote has the expertise to develop the standards in consultation with stakeholders and advise on the implementation of the standard at international and regional level. We have for instance been involved in the development of the Water Point Data Exchange (WPDx). In the energy sector we have contributed to creating a standard for exchanging energy performance data of households that respects rules and regulations around privacy and data ownership and a separate standard for authenticating and authorizing the building owners, inhabitants, energy assurance providers and other people who have a contractual requirement to use this household data. We are also exploring the creation of a sanitation data standard.
Water point data: WASHNote can advise on how to collect, process, manage and use water point data to improve water services. This includes the use of WPDx and tools for machine learning. See our white paper.
Structuring WASH data for use: data in the WASH sector is often scattered or is of low quality. WASHNote can help to prepare data for effective use towards the SDGs by cleaning data, connecting datasets and developing tools to act on the data. We are passionate about structured data and also the use of public repositories such as wikidata, JMP, AMCOW WASSMO, IATI, WPDx, SWA Mutual Accountability mechanism and other data sources and we also work to improve them so that in the future WASH activities and ultimately positive outcomes are accelerated. We have supported SWA and AMCOW most recently to structure data on country commitments and their monitoring of those commitments. Read about some of the ideas we are developing for WASH data.
Finance and life-cycle costing: organizing data and sharing results
Nick Dickinson worked on the IRC WASHCost project from 2008, a precursor of WHO TrackFin, and lead the development of tools to organized and share life-cycle costing data about water and sanitation service areas at IRC. More recently, WASHNote has developed models to characterize the costs of routine district activities in Sierra Leone related to water and sanitation to project the required finance to routinely monitor, support and regulate the implemention water and sanitation activities in Sierra Leone. Based on action plans in 8 countries, WASHNote is also characterizing the finance required to strengthen and maintain national M&E systems.
Additionally, we have experience evaluating business proposals using mobile technologies for WASH and energy and we are exploring ways of structuring data WASH services to create new markets and investment potential for WASH businesses.
