Institutionalising the monitoring of rural water supply services in Latin America; lessons from El Salvador, Honduras and Paraguay (Symposium 2013, Topic 2)

This paper has provided a generic approach for defining a rural water supply monitoring system alongside its institutionalisation into the sector in the context of Latin America. This approach, best applied in a multi-stakeholder process, under the coordination or leadership by the relevant government agency, provides a series of steps going from an assessment of current practices to the detailing of institutional arrangements. Based on initial application in El Salvador, Honduras and Paraguay, some first lessons have been identified. Even in the absence of a country monitoring system, a range of monitoring practices may already exist that can be built upon. The mapping of these opens up the possibility of considering a wider group of stakeholders who could eventually be users of the information, as well as contributing to the efforts and costs of data collection. [authors abstract]