Monitoring and Evaluation - Water For People India : Lasting Access to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation for Everyone Forever

India has played a prominent role in the formulation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). And much of our country’s National Development Agenda is mirrored in these SDGs. In fact, Niti Aayog has modelled the national performance indicators on the 17 SDGs, 169 targets and 306 national indicators.

Water For People India has adopted a similar approach to measure the impact and sustainability achieved by the Everyone Forever model in West Bengal (South 24 Parganas, Birbhum), Bihar (Sheohar), and Maharashtra (Amravati). Our indicators evaluate the development impact and compute a pathway towards achieving long-term sustainability. The metrics measure service levels related to water points and sanitation facilities at the household and public institution levels.

These metrics are based on several parameters pertaining to the functionality of water points, access to water, availability of water, quality of water, institutional structures and their capacities for operations and maintenance. For sanitation systems, measurements include access to toilets, quality of sub structure and super structure, people defecating outside, and management of faecal sludge.

Each sub-criteria contributes to a score that feeds into the overall scores for a particular criterion. The scores help assess the level of our outreach towards Everyone and understand the levels of service – High, Intermediate, Basic or Inadequate for water and sanitation services. In 2019, 8,430 households, 4,357 community water points and 1,338 public institutions were surveyed to measure water and sanitation service levels. The results are optimistic with respect to our goal of achieving universal access to safe water.

Below is a schematic representation of changes monitored over a three-year period in two locations in West Bengal and Bihar.

Water For People India also monitors and measures, on an annual basis, the performance of Service Authorities and Service Providers in a region. These measurements help us progress towards our goal of “sustainability” Forever. The indicators measure Structure, Finance, Management and Monitoring of the Service Authorities and Service Providers, based on a set of questions and score for each indicator.

The monitoring systems for the Everyone and Forever aspects guide our strategy and intervention programs in each region. All our initiatives are subjected to periodic external evaluation to assess their operational and strategic performance among primary and secondary stakeholders.