Monitoring, Evaluation, and Adaptive Management for Area-Wide Sanitation and Hygiene: Workshop Report

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is essential to understanding the barriers, successes, and progress made toward achieving area-wide sanitation and hygiene outcomes. However, M&E can be challenging to undertake, given significant and competing demands on limited local government resources and capacities. USAID’s WASHPaLS #2 area-wide sanitation (AWS) desk review identified significant knowledge gaps around effective practices, processes, and systems for M&E and adaptive management of area-wide sanitation and hygiene services. 

This report summarizes discussions and outcomes of a three-day workshop organized in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2022 by WASHPaLS #2, the Sanitation Learning Hub (SLH) at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and WaterAid, to identify processes, tools, principles, and minimum systems that enable local governments to effectively undertake M&E and support adaptive management to achieve and sustain AWS results. The workshop brought together national and local government representatives and UNICEF and WaterAid staff from Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, and Tanzania. 

Key findings included a predominant focus of sanitation and hygiene interventions and monitoring on the achievement of open defecation free (ODF) areas rather than on safely managed sanitation (SMS), limited monitoring to inform and track Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI), and limited understanding and enabling environment to facilitate adaptive management or course correction. In this climate, workshop participants discussed important starting points and recommendations for national and local governments to shift towards M&E of area-wide safely managed sanitation, including proposed indicators and monitoring processes for SMS and GESI, and adaptive management practices that take into account existing barriers and limitations.

The report provides an account of current practices and barriers towards building effective, local government-led M&E systems and processes, to inform programming efforts and/or further research into strengthening M&E for AWS.