WASHCost research teams prepare to launch large scale data survey

The WASHCost project is gearing up for a massive effort in data collection in 2010 to address key cost issues to improve service delivery on water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH).

A meeting of the research teams from Burkina Faso, Ghana, India and Mozambique was held in Maputo, Mozambique, from 2-7 November 2009 together with the Netherlands team based in The Hague. The meeting considered lessons from the testing phase of research and set plans for detailed data collection at scale and for embedding WASHCost in the planning and budgeting processes within countries and internationally.

Service ladders for water and sanitation

The WASHCost team has made significant gains addressing problems that obscure the link between costs and service delivery. It agreed the outlines for water and sanitation ‘ladders’ to assess levels of service within countries. These ladders will be linked to the service levels adopted by Governments but will also allow international comparisons in broad terms. The final details are being worked on and the ladders will be publically launched when complete. The sanitation ladder will include standards for the treatment for sewage and the disposal of solid waste, as well as for types of latrines, their use and for hygiene practices.

Catarina Fonseca, WASHCost Project director, said: “This was a special research meeting. Since the teams had all be doing data collection and had all gone through the same challenges, we could come together very fast. This project is not only about collecting costs it is also about the services provided and we finally managed to get that part of the puzzle completed. This research meeting has been more than the sum of the parts.”

Research protocol to be published in early 2010

The full WASHCost research protocol will be published in early 2010, detailing research questions and sampling methods. Country teams will be sampling households in hundreds of villages and peri-urban areas to identify the options that people have for water and sanitation, the cost drivers that affect those options and how and why households and governance bodies make their decisions.

In most countries there is already a strong demand from government bodies and others for data on costs – however WASHCost is focusing on increasing understanding of the life-cycle costs approach and how information is used. Central to this is the idea that capital costs are just one part of the picture – maintenance and support costs are essential to keep services running.

Country teams are embedding WASHCost into decision making at country level (state level in India) and developing ‘learning spaces’ where all those involved in WASH issues share their experiences and learn from each other.

Countries hunt out the hidden data

Final decisions on the sampling of villages and households are still to be taken in countries but the broad outlines have been agreed. Data is often difficult to find – especially to match up the different costs for each system and service. Decentralisation often means that data records become split across various bodies. In addition, every country has highlighted the need to differentiate between uses of formal and informal water sources in wet and dry seasons.

However, every country context is unique and approaches must be adapted to meet local needs.

• The Burkina Faso team succeeded in completing a challenging testing phase of data collection even though some research areas had experienced heavy rainfall and there were floods in some parts of the country. In Burkina, official household information may be based on lineage which does not give a good picture of what the research teams will actually find. Only at household level do they discover the family names and sometimes there are 60 households where the lineage name had suggested there was only one.
  

  Dr Amah Klutse and Mr Cyrille Amegnran during the research meeting in Maputo, Mozambique, Nov 2009. Photographer: Peter McIntyre

   Dr Amah Klutse, research director for WASHCost Burkina Faso, was delighted with the progress they had made: “We have validated our tools for going to scale. We come out also with a programme so we can see clearly the activities we will have for the coming years. We have set up teams which have really performed in terms of collecting data, processing it and analysing it. We discussed also embedding our research process within the country … to see how we can involve other partners at the national level in terms of achieving more results and how they will use the tools and the methodology they are setting up within the country.

• Mozambique is forging links with the National Institute of Statistics to draw on information from the official census, from a multi-indicator cluster survey (MICS) – used by the Joint Monitoring Program for the Millennium Development Goals, and from a budgeting census which analyses how people in Mozambique spend their money. This will give the Mozambique team guidance on where to do their data collection and what questions to ask to fill in the missing data. Mozambique also plans to obtain data from regulators and the utility providers. Arjen Naafs, Country Co-ordinator Mozambique, said “There are many challenges. One of the most important is to have credibility in the research we are obtaining so that people believe in the information we are presenting to them.”

• The Ghana team has identified a number of issues that require further analysis. For example many handpumps are still working more than 25 years after they were installed, but across all rural areas a third of handpumps are not working at all, irrespective of age. The team is looking into why this happens, and is using local experts to estimate the length of the downtime, the number of breakdowns a year and how much it costs to fix them. Kwabena Nyarko, WASHCost Director for Ghana, said: “In the next year, the key thing is to scale up the research methodology to collect data from three regions, working in nine districts in total, which means collecting data in 135 villages and probably nine small towns.”

• India has reshaped the teams that collect data to ensure high quality results. Even so it is often difficult to reconcile what is being found with official government data. WASHCost country coordinator Dr M Snehalatha said that the teams face a Herculean task to track maintenance costs after responsibility was passed from Government to local level. India will visit more households than other countries to meet Government expectations for a large sample (Andhra Pradesh where the project is working has about 71,000 habitations and a population of 76.2 million). The team is assembling expert groups to help them to validate the figures they are collecting.
  

  Dr M Snehalatha during her presentation in Maputo, Mozambique, Nov 2009. Photographer: Peter McIntyre

   

An internal monitoring programme has been adopted to track how well WASHCost is doing in influencing others to adopt a life-cycle unit cost approach, how well the project is being embedded and how well it is being managed.

The main data collection will be completed by the end of 2010. The next global meeting of WASHCost teams will be in Ghana in June 2010, followed by a public symposium at IRC in the Netherlands in November 2010 on the financing of decentralised WASH services.

Authors: Peter McIntyre and Edigio Raposo