ICT helps ensure that rural water supply and sanitation systems keep working.
Published on: 24/07/2017
Thanks to support from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), WaterAid Australia, mWater and IRC are proud to launch the RapidWASH Service level assessment tool.
Tracking service levels
Monitoring progress and performance in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) service delivery can be complex. This complexity can lead to confusion on what and how to measure, and how to interpret results. The Sustainable Development Goal on water (SDG 6) contains new WASH service level ladders, and these require more supporting data to show step changes towards progressive improvement.
Collection and management of this form of data is a significant challenge for the WASH sector. WASH monitoring data is commonly collected on paper or increasingly on smartphones. But then the data rarely gets stored in a useable system that can deliver clear and simple results for local WASH service providers.
RapidWASH is a free mobile based data collection, management and analysis tool for tracking water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) service levels. RapidWASH helps make decision making simple through the automated analysis and visualisation of WASH service level data. Those implementing WASH projects can undertake data driven decision making, prioritise areas for improvement and measure the sustainability of WASH interventions.
Timor-Leste
RapidWASH [allows] data driven decision making and adaptive management. Tim Davis.
RapidWASH has already delivered good results in seven WaterAid-supported projects in Liquica District, Timor-Leste. It provided detailed monitoring data that highlight strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to improve the performance of WASH service delivery. The software enabled baseline, midline and endline data collection with instant analysis across 20 service-level indicators. It automatically showed trends across communities allowing quick detection of failing services or vulnerable communities.
Information now provided in real-time through RapidWASH was previously understood anecdotally by local partners but never recorded and shared. RapidWASH has provided information about program performance that was not available through the counting beneficiaries, taps and toilets approach.
“The WASH sector is currently adapting to monitor step changes towards the SDGs" saysTim Davis, Performance and Impact Monitoring Advisor at WaterAid Australia. "To achieve universal access to WASH we need more evidence to support and sustain our approaches. RapidWASH has allowed our programs in Timor-Leste to visualise, understand and reflect on the changes resulting from service delivery programming, allowing data driven decision making and adaptive management”.
Smartphone data collection
RapidWASH consists of a web-based management system and Smartphone data collection via the mWater surveyor App. The globally applicable survey questions are deployed to people in the field for the collection of household and community data. Data is then automatically transferred from the Smartphone back to the RapidWASH management system where the service level analysis can be viewed.
Field data is automatically categorised into one of four service levels (improved, basic, substandard, no service). Information is transferred to decision makers quickly allowing data driven decisions, prioritisation of improvements to WASH infrastructure, management, finance structures and behaviours.
For more information or to get started you can visit the RapidWASH homepage at rapidwash.mwater.co
