SIASAR: a country-led indicator framework for monitoring the rural water and sanitation sector in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

The provision of water supply, sanitation and hygiene services has emerged as a top priority in the development agenda in Latin American and the Caribbean. In light of the investments envisaged to reach the targets set by the sustainable development goals, information systems will play a key role in improving decision-making. In this context, this article introduces a country-led and global IS, which has been increasingly implemented in numerous countries across Latin America and the Caribbean as a policy instrument to support national and local decision-making: the Rural Water and Sanitation Information System (SIASAR). SIASAR includes a comprehensive framework for data collection, analysis and dissemination that simultaneously fulfils different stakeholder needs. This article analyses these three key monitoring issues from the viewpoint of stakeholder involvement. Our results indicate that SIASAR represents a suitable monitoring framework to analyse sustainable services and the level of service delivered. Additionally, we highlighted some of the advantages of adopting a continued participatory approach in system development, including: (i) the stimulation of experience exchange and knowledge sharing between recipient countries; (ii) the promotion of learning-by-doing; and (iii) an increase of regional understanding, collaboration and comparisons.

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Index: Development and Application to Measure WASH Service Levels in European Humanitarian Camps

“…In such cases, they may be the only means towards obtaining a fracture of the required information (Haines-Young et al 2012;Karon et al 2017). Thus, several related efforts have been presented concerning various field applications of WASH assessment, monitoring and evaluation tools (WHO, UNICEF 2006;Webb et al 2006;Cohen and Sullivan 2010;Pérez-Foguet and Giné Garriga 2011;Giné Garriga and Pérez Foguet 2013a, b;Baquero et al 2017). The mechanics behind those can be as simple as ordinary registration of data on existing WASH services (e.g.…”

“…Rapid WASH Assessments) or as complex as the Rural Water and Sanitation Information System (SIASAR) developed by the World Bank. Such a system includes data collection, indicator processing, ranking and dissemination that simultaneously fulfils different stakeholder needs (Akpabio and Takara 2014;Requejo-Castro et al 2017). Each of those tools and frameworks is used on different occasions, phases of planning, conditions and contexts depending on the amount of information that is necessary or available each time.…”

WaSH CQI: Applying continuous quality improvement methods to water service delivery in four districts of rural northern Ghana

“…Surveys were piloted by the CQI team in 5 test communities outside the study area, refined based on pilot experiences, and administered using the Akvo FLOW V 1.6 mobile survey tool on mobile phones running the Android operating system. Use of mobile survey tools in WaSH has been reviewed previously [ 24 , 25 ].…”

Bayesian network modelling of hierarchical composite indicators

“…We opted for this pilot study due to i) its open-database available for interested stakeholders, and ii) its complex hierarchical structure of indicators and composite indicators. SIASAR collects primary data and after a systematic process of data validation, datasets are published and can be easily accessed online (Requejo-Castro et al, 2017;SIASAR, 2017). For data collection, a set of questionnaires are developed to analyse the sustainability of services from four different perspectives: i) the community, ii) the water system, iii) the service provider, and iv) the technical assistance provider.…”

“…Thus, it is possible to find composites which tackle independently water-related (Bordalo et al, 2006;Cho et al, 2010;Cohen and Sullivan, 2010;Pérez-Foguet, 2010, 2011;Sullivan et al, 2003), sanitation-related WSP, 2015) or hygiene-related issues (Giné-Garriga and Pérez-Foguet, 2013;Webb et al, 2006). Additionally, more integrated approaches have addressed WaSH-related issues from a Human Right perspective (Flores Baquero et al, 2016;Luh, et al, 2013) and from a more sectoral-focused one (Giné-Garriga and Pérez-Foguet, 2013;Godfrey et al, 2014;Requejo-Castro et al, 2017). One major weakness is that CI do not address the existing interrelationship of the indicators they integrate; they do not describe the increasing interdependency of the real world.…”