Susan Davis

By Susan Davis, Executive Director, Improve International

In July 2012, I visited Ethiopia and learned more about the national government’s admirable efforts to develop a National WASH Inventory. The proliferation of affordable mobile tools, cell phone towers, and user-friendly platforms for mapping and data collection has enabled several governments and humanitarian organizations to attempt large-scale mapping of water points. The benefits of knowing where your water points are, and whether they are functional, are numerous, and include:

• National governments can develop realistic budgets prioritize geographic areas or sub-populations and coordinate efforts
• Interested parties can spot patterns and trends – are water systems working better in some areas  than others? Do some technologies last longer than others?

Ethiopia National WASH Inventory: The full inventory is expected to be released by September 2012. Data collection for the inventory was launched in certain regions in November 2010. In December 2011, a 2.4 million birr project funded by the Ethiopia Ministry of Water & Energy to assess the WASH inventory of Addis Ababa was completed.  It included an assessment of the types of toilets, water supplies in households, and their financial ability to pay for water fees. The information was collected through 1,276 trained people over three years.

In addition to Ethiopia’s work, I knew about other efforts, but I recently joined the Rural Water Supply Network’s Water Point Mapping group and learned of a few more, described below.

Liberia WASH Portal: The World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) worked with the Government of Liberia to map 7000-plus rural water points.  It was difficult to get to some of the remotest areas (see a video about it here). The findings of 60% functionality, and nearly 1 million citizens still without any access to improved resources, are helping the Government of Liberia to shape a new infrastructure investment plan. (For more information, click here.)

Sierra Leone STAT WASH database: WSP also used this process in Sierra Leone to map 27,000 water points.

Uganda’s Water Supply Atlas: Shows safe water supply coverage, functionality and distribution.  The baseline survey was carried out in 2009/2010 and published in February 2011. (Also see the RWSN report with “golden rules” for sector performance management based on Uganda’s experience.)

Tanzania: Water point data has been collected for 13 districts and plans are underway to scale up the exercise nationwide.

Swaziland: WaterAid assisted UNICEF to trained the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Forum on water point mapping. In the pilot study they mapped water points in 8 of Swaziland’s constituencies to determine the number of water supply schemes that exist and whether they were functional. A further goal of the exercise was to compare infrastructure levels with population served in each constituency (an example summary is below – email us if you’d like to see the full report). 

Kenya: SNV in partnership with TWAWEZA and UNICEF will support the government of Kenya to carry out water point mapping in all 47 counties. They plan to complete 12 counties in 2012. SNV has two consultants (ERMIS and UPANDE) providing technical support to government staff, who will visit and map the water points.

There’s also a website that is hoping to collect this information called Water Point Mapping – it only has information from Tanzania right now.

Do you know of other national water point mapping databases?  Please email us or share a link in the comments below.