Observations of the sector: Evolving from #MapWASH to #ManageWASH
By: Annie Feighery
Tags: Ngo, Data, Dataviz, Aïd, Water

The unique benefit of being mWater is that we have more exposure to WASH workers than perhaps any other entity in the sector. We get to work with small water user committees and the largest iNGOs and every academic researcher, government office, and multilateral agency in between in the 165 countries represented in our user base. This exposure provides a 30,000 foot (10k m) view of who is working on the cutting edge, which approaches are getting the most traction, and where far more attention is needed from donors. It is a pleasure to have this ongoing relationship with our users. The movement we are watching at the moment is a transition from a focus on mapping to managing.

I begin each day by looking at my ‘metrics that matter’ dashboard for mWater user activity. When I train mWater administrators, I always recommend they make their own dashboard like this to aggregate the big picture of management priorities. This dashboard comprises high-level indicators of organizational performance.

Annie’s Metrics that Matter dashboard, begins with total users over time and new users by month

For me, this includes how many users we are adding by week or month and our churn rate — how many users are staying engaged versus falling off after trying out the portal or app; but also how users are engaging with different parts of the platform, especially new features we recently released. Just this past month, we released pipes mapping and water systems as a site type. It is exciting to see users in eight countries already jumped into this by making 156 piped systems as of today.

A graph showing surveys completed by mWater users over the past 12 months

In this next graph on my morning metrics dashboard, you can see we are having a really great month in terms of surveys submitted. The previous record of 150k is crushed by 181k and we still have 10 days left in the month! This, for a month with a major holiday marked by many of our users, is especially impressive. You have been busy! Surveys are the foundation of most of the features in mWater — making it my favorite metric to grow.

While some users only engage the platform for surveys, sites are the revolutionary feature that changed the WASH sector most, allowing for ongoing management rather than mere monitoring and evaluation. Before relational databases and cloud-based computing, most of the data collection in the WASH sector was one-off inventories that were out of date the minute their creation activity ended and could not build off of one another over time. Funders would pay enumerators to map infrastructure and/or assets on two- to five-year cycles. Other than situational awareness, which was mostly useful for donors’ planning, these inventories did not contribute to daily management at all.

The innovation made possible by advances in technology with platforms including mWater is sites. Once sites are mapped in our global, open-access database of sites, users can update their infrastructure and asset inventories in real time as part of a daily management cycle. Then, an inventory needed by a donor or other stakeholder for situational analysis is a simple matter of querying the database in a map, graph, or datagrid.

mWater Portal map of Mwanza, Tanzania showing a combined metric called Functional Water Access, comprising the MDG target of distance and the SDG metrics of functioning and safe (potable).

mWater’s foundation for data-driven management of infrastructure involves mapping sites that never move or change attributes, such as water points, schools, communities, and healthcare facilities; and then monitoring them over time with surveys. A survey on a water point may monitor whether it is functioning and/or potable, as viewable in the map to the left; whereas a survey on a healthcare facility may monitor whether there is a functioning tap from the utility, but also whether there are enough gloves and other personal protective equipment in advance of an outbreak.

This longitudinal monitoring is the basis for the sustainably managed mandate in SDG6. Governments and other stakeholders in WASH, primarily iNGOs but also community organizations and researchers, can share their knowledge of the locations of assets with publically accessible maps and then each actor can keep their own data record of those sites with their own surveys that can be private to them or publicly shared as indicators. If the surveys they deploy for monitoring are created from the mWater Indicator Library, the data collected is comparable between stakeholders, geographies, and time.

New sites created by our users makes a great metric. I have really enjoyed the growth in mapping sanitation sites this past year. But disaggregating new sites is where the metric I monitor gets interesting. Sites are either manually created by app users or they are uploaded from past, or legacy data collection activities either conducted in other platforms or on paper and kept in Excel. While I love our organically created sites, I like seeing uploaded sites because it means we are recovering past one-off inventories and building on data collection efforts that otherwise would have been lost on hard drives and in file cabinets. However, my favorite view of sites data is sites that are updated.

Updated sites are sites that were created or uploaded and then users created a survey about them at a later time. This metric is an indicator that stakeholders in the WASH sector are evolving from mapping and inventory-keeping to managing the assets ongoingly. This is the indicator that iNGOs are growing past dig-and-ditch approaches; that researchers are designing their studies to contribute to the local data ecosystem; and, most importantly, that governments are growing management systems to engage with assets and infrastructure over time.

A graph of water point sites disaggregated by sites added manually in the Surveyor app, uploaded from another platform or file, and — of both of those — number updated by a survey in the mWater Surveyor app

The growth of this updated sites metric tells us at mWater that the WASH sector stakeholders working in our platform are beginning to embrace the systems approach called for in SDG6. A lot is being said about systems in the WASH sector right now. It can be confusing to know what a system is and how systems-based approaches change your work. Systems, as an approach, is merely management of things — things that make up your infrastructure and the infrastructure assets needed to keep that infrastructure working. In WASH, that infrastructure is usually a water scheme or sanitation facilities, but it can also be the entity that manages that infrastructure like a school or healthcare facility. Connecting that bit of infrastructure to the broader unit of things that together serve people makes it into a system.

A graph of all sites in mWater that have been updated by month

The foundation of systems management is longitudinal monitoring, in other words, checking on assets and infrastructure over time with surveys and using the data from checking on them to build data visualizations in live reports that make decisions about resource allocation. In practice, this can look like the monthly cycle a government’s district water office follows of reporting outages, sending repair teams, and tracking which parts were needed so that over the year, it is possible to see which parts are most needed, which types of assets are most likely to fail, and how many funds are collected by fees. Click here to learn more about asset tracking for management of systems.

There are many more features in mWater to help advance systems management, including assignments, issues or tickets, population density maps, and consoles — which are grab-and-go MIS systems with visualizations built from your maps, dashboards, pivot tables, and datagrids. The foundation of it all is mapping sites and updating them over time with surveys.