 Good day everyone, and welcome to our webinar on Improven Sanitation Data Systems in South Asia. To start, we are going to come over to today's moderator, Miramita. Thank you, Vasis. It's great to have this webinar on, this is sort of on demand made available on the IWA Connect Plus platform and IWA network website with presentation slides and other information. The speakers will be responsible for securing copyright permissions for any work that they present and if they are not the legal copyright holder. The opinions, hypotheses, conclusions, recommendations in these presentation and other materials are their sole responsibility of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect IWA opinion. Just to give a before we actually start on the webinar, there are two facilities that are provided. One is chat box and the other is a question and answer box. Please feel free to participate actively in this and the attendees microphones are muted but you can participate through this activity and your questions will be taken up to the extent that it's possible. This is also part of the Global Inclusive Urban Sanitation Initiative of the IWA. It focuses particularly on inclusive sanitation service goals and the service systems that are required to achieve them and it emphasizes that it's not enough to focus on only infrastructure and technology but look beyond to other aspects and the major aspect that today we'll be discussing is on looking at data systems that are absolutely essential for monitoring of these services. We had done in fact a webinar at the last IWA event in Kigali and which focused exactly on the same topic on improving data systems for sanitation. There was very active participation and some of the speakers that are there today in fact were also participating in that and we had contributions from Bangladesh and from Uganda at that workshop, at that seminar. So this is really a continuation of that workshop to take forward the discussions and particularly focusing on inclusive sanitation agenda and looking at sanitation, whole sanitation service chain and sanitation systems that look at not only sewerage as it was in the past but also look at on-site sanitation systems. We are going to have four speakers and I will introduce them as we go along but they are from Rick Johnson from WHO, Shishir Vishwas from DPHE, Bangladesh, Rajit Tosa from Nepal, BWSFM and Aditi Dviyaji from Seawall SEP here in India. So this is broadly the agenda. We will have first after the welcome we'll have presentation by Rick from WHO JMP on the global efforts particularly then we will have the presentation from Bangladesh looking at data systems strengthening for sanitation, the activities that are ongoing in Bangladesh by Shishir Kumar. Rajit Tosa then will present for NWASH, MIS and the activities that are ongoing in Nepal. Lastly, not last but not the least the presentation from Aditi Dviyaji from here at our institute Seawall SEP looking at cases from India where similar activities have been going on. And we'll end with question and answer discussion to the extent possible. So I'll now invite Rick to have the first presentation. Rick is we are really fortunate to have Rick Johnson join us for this webinar. Rick has been with WHO for over a decade and leads the work on sanitation for the JMP. He has been at the forefront in developing approaches to respond to the new thinking in sanitation. On a more personal note, Rick has always been very open to feedback and discussion whenever we approached him for any work any activities is always there to help us. I would request Rick to then start the presentation. Thanks so much mirror for the kind words and it's always been a pleasure to engage with you as well. So I am Rick Johnson. I'm with the WHO I lead the WHO side of the joint monitoring program which is joint with UNICEF my colleague Tom Slaymaker leads on that side. And today I wanted to talk about our work on monitoring sanitation at the global level. Good. So last year the JMP published a progress report. And you can see from the bar charts on the right there. I'm sorry the legend is hidden but the light green is basic sanitation and the dark green is safety managed sanitation. So in 2022 about 57% of the global population used safety managed sanitation services. It was higher in urban than in rural areas. But that means that there were about three and a half billion people who didn't have safety managed sanitation services, including 419 million practicing open defecation. So the data coverage continues to grow from report to report. We had estimates for 135 countries in last year's report that represent about 86% of the global population. So that's pretty high coverage. It also allows us to look at trends and we can see that the rate of progress historically has not been fast enough to get to 100% by 2030. In fact to reach that level we would have to be moving five times faster than the historical rate of progress. So there's definitely need for acceleration. I just wanted to remind people about the definitions. The J&P uses this service ladder with different service levels ranging from no service at all and open defecation up to safely managed at the top. The top three rungs, safely managed, basic and limited. Those are all households that are using improved sanitation facilities. If they're shared it counts as a limited service. If they're not shared it's basic service. But in order to be safely managed there are different ways to be counted as safely managed. It has to be improved and not shared first. But then it could be wastewater that's treated offsite. That's through a sewer connection that reaches a treatment plant that provides at least secondary treatment. Or it could be an onsite sanitation facility that actually contains the waste safely. And the waste are either emptied and treated offsite. You can think about vehicle sludge management and trucks and FSTPs. Or it's contained but it's not emptied and it's treated and disposed of in situ. So we call those three different pathways into safely managed sanitation. I'll talk a little bit more about them on following slides. The J&P has a website where you can look at country data or regional data. There's a little dashboard below where you can see the six countries in IWA South Asia region. For three of those countries Bangladesh, India and Nepal. There were enough nationally representative data to produce estimates for safely managed sanitation. And in those three countries it was possible to have also an urban rural disaggregation. Which always tells a better picture because you can really see which populations are having services and which ones are not. Also for Pakistan you can see one of the bars has dark green. That's because there were enough data to make an estimate for safely managed sanitation in rural areas but not in urban areas. Whereas the other three countries Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. We didn't have sufficient national information either at the national scale or urban or rural to get safely managed. But we did have enough to track the other wrongs. So basic, limited, unimproved and open defecation. So what's missing then? What are the data that are needed? Well first I wanted to show what types of improved sanitation facilities are being used in these countries. And I know the colors aren't very different here on this graph. But the dark green, darkish green represents improved latrines. The middle color is septic tanks and the lightest color at the bottom is sewer coverage. And the thing that you can see quickly from this graph of these six countries is that sewer coverage is not very high in any of these countries. It's always higher in urban areas. In rural areas it's negligible in these countries except for Pakistan which seems to have about 8% of the rural population connected to sewer lines. And indeed in Pakistan the urban coverage at 62% is the highest region in the region. For all of the other countries, even in rural, even in urban areas, we're talking about, you know, less than half, maybe up to a third, a quarter of the population having sewer connections. And what that means is that, okay, it's possible to have safely managed sanitation through sewer connections and if there are national data on wastewater treatment plants. But the majority of the population doesn't have that. They're using onsite sanitation. So that has different data implications. It means you need to know, well, are those onsite sanitation facilities really functioning? Are they containing waste? Are they filling up? What happens when they fill it up? When they get emptied, where does the waste go? If they don't get emptied, do they get buried and stored in situ or do they get unsafely handled? So that's a very different kind of data question then. And just before I leave this, I wanted to mention also that not only is onsite sanitation higher than sewer sanitation, growth in onsite sanitation is higher than growth in sewer sanitation at the global level, even in urban areas. I'm not sure about the six countries in this region. So I mentioned data coverage and data gaps. The first two rungs here show that these six countries, the basic indicators that were used in the MBGs of improved sanitation and shared sanitation data are widely available. This is routinely captured in all kinds of household surveys and we have data trends. Oh, I'm sorry. I went the wrong way on the slide. Here we go. So improved and shared sanitation, full data available. For wastewater treatment for the sewer population, only India were we able to find nationally representative data about wastewater treatment from centralized wastewater treatment plants. I've grayed out rural because the rural coverage is so low with sewer, but still it would be nice if nationally representative data on wastewater treatment, centralized wastewater treatment were available for the other countries, even though sewer coverage is not very high in urban areas, still it's growing. And as we saw in Pakistan, it's already quite high. Then the next two rungs about whether onsite sanitation facilities are contained and either emptied and removed offsite or safely treated in Sichu, we see that in none of the countries do we have nationally representative data on what happens when these these septic tanks, these pit latrines are emptied and taken offsite. We have a lot of nice examples of a few municipalities, a few FSTPs that are either working really well or maybe aren't really working well, but we haven't found a national picture yet for any of these six countries. And so hopefully in the future that data gap could be filled. Whereas safely treated in Sichu, we do have examples of countries collecting nationally representative data through household surveys, such as the multiple indicator cluster surveys the mix that have been fielded in Bangladesh and Nepal and Pakistan, and other national surveys like the Indian National Sample Survey or the Bangladesh National Hygiene Survey both of those from 2018 that collect data on containment and emptying and what happens when these systems are emptied. So the bottom line then is that safely managed sanitation data were only available for the countries, basically that had data on containment and safe treatment in Sichu and that's because that's the dominant form of sanitation used by people in those countries. That's why for Pakistan, we don't have safely managed sanitation because most people are using sewer connections, and we haven't found, you know, national data on wastewater treatment. Okay, so how to fill these gaps. Household surveys are one tool. It's not the only tool but it's one tool. And I mentioned the mixed surveys. They now contain three questions about containment. What does your septic tank, does your pit latrine, does it have an outlet pipe? What does that connect to? Has your septic tank or pit latrine overflowed or flooded or collapsed during the last year? So those kinds of data can tell us if the systems are effectively containing waste. Then there are also questions about emptying practices, some of which are leading towards safe management and some are not. So if people say that they've never emptied it, okay, that can count as safely managed. If they've emptied it and then they've buried it nearby in a covered pit or a covered trench, that can also count as safe management. If they say it was emptied, but then it was discharged into an uncovered pit or a water body, clearly that's not safely managed sanitation. If they say it was emptied and removed offsite, it could be safely managed, but you don't know. Then you would need to have additional information about, you know, the trucks and the treatment plants that the households aren't in a position to give. So you would have to combine that with other data. So we've had a project for the last four years now called safely managed onsite sanitation that tries to look at all these steps of the sanitation and what type of sanitation chain and what types of data could be used to plug gaps along the way. Looking at containment, emptying, transport, treatment and disposal. We've finished a phase one set of pilot countries, including Bangladesh and are now working in a set of phase two pilots, including Nepal. So this region is definitely well represented in our SMOS project and there are a number of resources available on the website that you can see there. Just some key findings from the SMOS project are that there's a lot of FSM programming around what happens when the trucks come and they empty the containment. Where do they go and what kind of treatment happens and what about the sludge, but there's less focus on what happens before the trucks come. Is that containment really containing waste or does it really have an open pipe that's leading to an open drain? Because you can have the best FSM in the world, but if that tank has been discharging untreated waste into the environment before the truck comes, you know, it's a hazard and it's certainly not safety managed sanitation. And both in Bangladesh and Serbia, inspections of the facilities found that many of them were not safely containing wastes. In Bangladesh, there are also new questions in about containment and leakage in a new big national survey that should give additional information about containment in that country. I think I'm going to skip the details here, but just to note that through the SMOS pilots, we found that it's important to distinguish between the global indicators, which are relatively simple and few, and the local indicators which are necessary for national monitoring purposes and local monitoring. So things like groundwater risk, safety to workers, PPE, numbers of years of operation, the size of the tank, that's all really important national information. None of that is necessary for safety managed sanitation at a global level, and in fact the global systems couldn't possibly accommodate that much detail because each country will have its own different systems. So that was a key finding of the pilot was to understand which bits are necessary for global and which bits are necessary for local. Another key finding is that we need data along the entire sanitation chain from the type of facility to the emptying treatment and transport, but different data sources can serve for those different stages. And when you're closer to the facility and the containment, the data are more reliable if they really come from households themselves through a questionnaire or some kind of inspection by someone coming to visit it. More than from regulators or administrative data, but once the waste leave the household and we get into emptying transport and treatment. The household doesn't know what's happening there and the better sources of data are coming from administrative sources or regulators. So the trick is to be able to combine those to make one coherent story. On sanitation inspections, the WHO and the JMP have been working together to come up with these simple checklists to visit sanitation facilities and see are there risks, are there corrective actions that could be taken. There's been a lot of experience with this in water infrastructure, and now we're looking at developing similar tools for assessing sanitation infrastructure. And those could be used to monitor compliance with regulatory requirements or to perform risk assessments or to track progress in a project. And we see these as a key tool for local authorities to use to strengthen and upgrade sanitation facilities. For instance, in an ODF program to monitor against slippage and to look at higher levels of service. And finally, we see that regulatory authorities are key tool or stakeholder to to to collect this type of information, either directly collecting it themselves or harvesting it from other partners. They have the mandate to advise on the status of the sector. The mandate in many cases includes not just sewer connections but also non sewered sanitation. And we do see many regulatory authorities are expanding their work to explicitly cover non sewered sanitation as well. And that creates new data challenges. I know we're going to hear from Nepal about NWASH and the ambition there to build a national MIS that includes the sanitation services, but also in Bangladesh and India, I know you have really advanced database systems. So I'm looking forward to hearing those experiences. Just wanted to mention that globally we do engage with regulators around the world and also with regional networks of regulators. There's a very strong one in Africa called ASAWAS. And I think there could be some value or interest in maybe establishing such types of networks in South Asia or East Asia where there's a lot of interesting work happening. So with that, I thank you and I turn back to the moderator I think for the next presentation. Thanks Nick very much for a amazing overview of all the activities that have been done by WHO in improving the whole monitoring system. And I think your reference at the end to looking at national data systems is certainly something that actually hopefully will be highlighted by our next set of speakers. So thank you very much Rick. I'm not sure about regulators in this region but maybe it'll come up in the discussions during the presentations and after that. Certainly in Africa it is relevant but we'll have to see what kind of systems do we need for South Asia. So thanks Rick. Again, I will now like to invite Dr. Shishir Biswas. He's an executive engineer with the Department of Public Health Engineering in Bangladesh. He's been involved in establishing establishment of web-based sanitation and waste management dashboard for 61 district towns and integrated management of what is known as IMI's that system in Bangladesh. So he really has signed up experience that we were talking about that is needed for country level monitoring systems. Previously he was also engaged in many research projects with Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. And he has impressive background in terms of civil engineering and master's degree in that. So let me invite Shishir to make his presentation on Bangladesh. Thank you very much moderator. This is Shishir Kumar Biswas, Executive Engineer Department of Public Health Engineering. Now thank you very much for inviting me for sharing my experience on data system strengthening for sanitation in Bangladesh. So the government of Bangladesh has been actively pursuing for national development goals through the smart Bangladesh. As the country aims to achieve the SDG 6.2 in 2030 isn't up for safely managed sanitation. The importance of public data system has grown the national sanitation dashboard. As you mentioned, and the integrated municipal leaders and city corporations system information were established in 2019 and 2020 enhancing functions such as investment shaping, planning, sustainable management and monitoring of sanitation system. Despite this efforts challenges like data fragmentation and lack of standardization persist, leading to a digital divide and hindering access to wide range of users. And the right side, some picture is here that we have, I mean under DPHG, we have conducted a comprehensive survey for extracting sanitation data specifically for a fakus large management system and municipal solid waste management system in the 53 district towns municipalities in Bangladesh and city corporations. Most of the people I mean our brand people remains here under a feasibility study project and found a nice database from that and incorporated all of those in our national sanitation database. That was the basic study. And you can say that faster study for highlighting specifically for sanitation in urban sanitation Bangladesh. Before going to my main topic. So here is some information conducted by Bangladesh Board of Statistics, our sensors just completed in 2021. According to the sensors, there's the water supply statistics, the safely managed water supply system in 2023 is about 71.22% and if you consider the sanitation system. Apart from the safely managed sanitation system, we have the basic sanitation, 69.68, limited 23.95 and improved 5.43. What I'm telling that apart from the safely managed sanitation, because still now we are really working on the shared latrine, though those are really improved and we have provided different facilities under different projects. That is 25.9% but according to the GMP report, the safely managed sanitation, Bangladesh is only 39%. So here is the now a gap. So now Bangladesh government has introduced the concept that is smart Bangladesh, a smart Bangladesh will be affordable, sustainable, inclusive knowledge based, intellectual and innovative, for four pillars, smart citizen, smart economy, smart government and the government and smart society. The previously the vision for economic emancipation and now the target for reaching in 2041, the cultural emancipation, non-communal, progressive, inclusive and economically developed smart Bangladesh. Now, where is the water supply and sanitation in this concept that is the smart city service and our government concept that all the urban facilities need to be provided for all the rural areas, that's why the smart city sectors, water and sanitation services are very, very much important. So the pledges from 2024 to 2028, the efforts will be intensified to enhance the safe water supply in Swiss system with plans to make the water supply system environmentally friendly by 2028, West management will be established up to district to Pogela and Union level. One thing I need to mention that in Bangladesh, you know that the very small country land is really scarce here. So, separately, providing facilities for sanitation only, non-swear sanitation system also a central sewer system is very difficult. That's why our government is thinking for integrated development activities, considering the municipal solid waste management and also the FECASAS management system for both urban, peri-urban and rural areas. The comprehensive action plan has been initiated to establish safe water resources to water treatment plants, implement West management and ensure hygiene sanitation system for every household in rural areas. And decentralization of the powers, actually the delegations of powers of local government institutions, specifically our city corporations, municipalities, Union level and Upojala level and Jila level. Those are very, very much important. Otherwise, the accountability, transparency of data and real time development activities for all will not be possible. That is also very important for Bangladesh government. So now, according to the Statistics Act 2013, our Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics is the only national statistical office in the country. They actually collect data, census data, and also data of different segments, different attributes. And also, as I mentioned that for water supply sanitation, urban, rural, peri-urban, all of those. But you know that it is not really possible for only Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics to collect data only by themselves. They share data from different other organizations and Department of Public Health Engineering since once throughout the country for providing the services of water supply sanitation, sanitation, a waste management drainage system. We share our basic data, collected data every year we are collecting through different project activities and also from our revenue activities. We share those data to our Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and they really update their data every year. So data governance framework they have established very, very much important because only data, any types of data collection is not at all to present. And represent any specific services that can be, I said that yes, it is the national database, it is not possible. So screening and under a framework is screening and that is also very, very much important. We have the data structures, data architectures, data modeling and design, data storage and operational data security, data integration and interoperability. All of those are really integrated on this data governance. We have other regulations and frameworks, how to execute, how to utilize this. And sharing and utilizing to different government agencies and non-government agencies. So here is a flow diagram. You know that we are also looking for achieving the goals of sustainable development goals. So our Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics actually follows a process, the survey sensors, administrative records and innovative approach, absolutely. And they provide those data. Now we have the access to information and some other divisions monitoring and controlling by our prime minister's office. We have the SDG cells. So after their technical support, their screening and validation, those goes to our online platform that is SDG tracker. And those are also shared to the respective agencies. I'll share it as some slides, who are actually getting those informations and sharing their respective informations to these specific sector, I mean, work sector. So as I mentioned that the mainly controlled by our SDG affairs under prime minister's office. So, department of public health engineering and some other wasps and city corporations have received some specific designated activities, some assignments for achieving the goals of 6.1 SDG 6.1.1 6.1.2. And also, supporting with the wash that those are some environmental statistics household survey of health, sanitation in disaster prone areas in Bangladesh and municipalities. And for us, I mean, municipalities and city corporations, waste management and sanitation data. We have to collect those specific informations under a very specific questionnaire with using different tools and innovative ideas from rural levels, urban levels, municipalities and city corporations. And preserve it to our DPHG platform. You know that we have already established a city wide inclusive sanitation cells. We have integrated server and a connection with the server to our Bangladesh group statistics for screening and let's level of activities. So, again, I'm going to the feasibility study we have completed based on the criteria of city wide inclusive sanitation, we have our framework FSM frameworks and also implementation plan. Selecting different criteria and our indicators for series comprehensive study had been conducted during 2019 2020 and up to June 2021 and accumulated all of those data in our open source. West side that is Sandboard is an BORD. So anybody in any other country can easily be excess the information of the Sandboard what types of data actually we have accumulated in it. Sheet flow diagram also and the flow pattern of sheets from the containment system from generation till the disposal systems with the shanky diagram can easily be identified including the percentage the values of every component of this value chain. But we are quite like behind in rural sanitation system. Since the Bangladesh Borough statistics collects through sensors data, the rural information, but we are now trying to establish a framework and also a master plan for rural sanitation also and hopefully the regular data collection will be started from our rural and will also be included to our national sanitation dashboard. In the meantime, we have assigned some MOU with the GWSC and our plan to establish a data management framework, data governance framework and basic concept of data commanding center. We have established in a DPHE and they have also started their work under the support of Bangladesh government and BMGF. So ongoing efforts towards our data system strengthening government flagship program strengthening of the public data system for sanitation in Bangladesh to build a robust and reliable national. If you can now wind up in a couple of minutes please. Okay, I'm going fast. So, after this, we have established this data command center. This is a one stop platform for accessing sorting, analyzing and visualizing sanitation data from various sources of level we have some time bound assignment. And hopefully this data, what we are actually collecting will be standardized and validated. So access to information also working hard and supporting us since they are under Prime Minister's office and related to provide the information to our SDG trackers. So they develop say robust data governance framework and create a data stewardship role among stakeholder organizations. So, here's the concept of the data governance. I'm not going in detail. So the other organizations which I have mentioned the directorate of primary education we are providing support to our primary education. All the primary schools we are providing wash facilities, road transport highway divisions, Bangladesh Borough statistics, public sports department, department of shipping, some other organizations are like this. I am is has already been introduced and in every urban projects we are introducing this I am I system, not only for the sanitation but also for water supply. So all the information, the holistic information we are actually collecting and accumulating in our server and chronologically and under a standard system we are preserving and all the other informations including the our business model data collection system and you can say that providing the service and and tariff direction systems are utilizing this under this I am I platform. So, apart from the some plant tasks that are interministerial coordination enhancing coverage of national sanitation dashboard, expanding data collection infrastructure standardizing the data collection protocols that are sharing agreements and data updating mechanism. So, is this is point to some other sub indicators you know that I have already said that we have provided improved shared Latin but it is not actually counted in our system so some other indicators we are thinking about. So, thank you very much from my side. Thank you very much for. Thank you, Mr which was for a very engaging presentation and the kind of complexities that are involved when you work at the national level and you know relating to the plan, kind of different data systems that are there. So, I think it was very good in terms of highlighting these issues. May I now invite Dr Roja from Nepal. Dr Roja is the chief of N wash and the institutional support and service advisory support in the department of water supply and sewerage department in government of Nepal. And I think from my earlier meeting with him which are only online. That is very conversant with the kind of activities that are going on in wash sector in Nepal and has been, I think, taking a leadership role in terms of setting up monitoring systems which are extremely essential to improve our time. So that's something that we are really looking forward to over to Rajit. Hi, Namaste and good afternoon everyone. I'm Rajit Oza from Nepal. Thank you for the opportunity for the presentation today I'm going to present about national wash mi is which, which not only covers sanitation but also covers water supply and hygiene as well. It is a digitized tool for monitoring and planning also. Idea of idea of our development of mi is was to support the local governments for the planning of SDG 6.1 and 6.2 so along with the monetary of all those indicators which we can see in terms of status. We have laid the local government know about what is their goal in terms of SDGs and what is the investment requirement. This is the back in calculation that we have supported them in doing and what can be the financial option so they can also discuss the financial option inside the overall management information system. So this is one of the example of where how we are collecting the status. This is one of the example from. One of the municipalities of Nepal where you can see the overall status in terms of JMP ladders. Mostly we have adapted to JMP's indicators. We are also fortunate to fortunate to get the JMP support in terms of improvement of these indicators and we are also doing few improvement in these indicators now and then and the discussion on improvement of those indicators are going on. But mostly aligned with these are mostly aligned with JMP's indicators as pointed out before. So this is a status that how much we have collected the data more than among 753 more than 258 local governments have finished the data collection, which will allow them to know the status. Then they will do the prioritization of the projects which can be the project bank for the provincial governments and the federal governments as well. And then overall planning cost can be calculated and which we can see in terms of wash plan of 158 municipalities and rural municipalities. As I mentioned before, the calculation of investment requirements can also be calculated. This we have adapted based on the life cycle cost assessment where we talk about the capital investment. We talk about the capital maintenance investments. We talk about the operational expenditures. We talk about the direct support capacity building support. And we talk about how much total investment will be required. And so based on this one, we'll know how much investment will be required in one local government and how much investment will be required in the overall federal government. So this is allowing us to plan for the investment as well. And this is one of the example that shows how much investment will be required based upon the local government's prioritization. So to support this, we identified there are few governance pillars that should also be assessed and we tried to link it with the citywide inclusive sanitation indicators as well. For example, how are the local governments updating the database and how they are using. So it falls under the responsibility and accountability indicators of citywide inclusive sanitation. Similarly, we are also seeing what are the local legal frameworks are present so that they could be able to regulate, they could be able to plan, they could be able to formulate the guidelines. So if they can't formulate it, the support from federal and provincial government will be necessary. So we're trying to identify the support necessary support for the local government based on these data sets. So not only the output related data sets, we are also supporting them in terms of the process data sets that will help them to strengthen the overall system. So this is like whether they have the human resource available or not, whether they have the TOR available or not, how they are in terms of the organogram of local governments, whether they are getting the adequate training or not. So these kind of areas also are under the discussion inside and wash MIS. Then we talk about the financing option where we talk about what can be the possible option for those local governments, how much tariff they can generate, how much tax they can use inside wash, how much transfer they are expecting from federal and federal government, provincial government and other development partners. And also is there a possibility of like bringing the private sector in terms of trade, how much self supply is happening there so that overall financing landscapes could be seen. These all indicators has been taken from the track fin initiative that we are doing now with the support of WHO. So this is one of the examples that we did for the water supply service providers which we are thinking of doing it in sanitation service provider as well, where would be able to track where they are in terms of level and quality of services. I am showing this now for the water supply services, but the similar kind of arrangements can be made for the sanitation service as well where we can see the key performance indicators such as like regularity of service, the coverage and this kind of service can be seen in terms of level and quality of water supply service. And then we can see the process indicators of those service provider in terms of operation and management efficiency for example like how they are doing the asset management, how they are doing the accounting systems, what is the billing efficiency, what is the metering efficiency. So these kind of indicators comes under the operation and management efficiency and based on this one the operators we can try to find out where the operators are lagging in terms of key performance indicator. So this will fall under the federal regulation and we will know which kind of support will be needed for the service provider and we are hoping we could make the similar system for the sanitation service providers as well which will allow us to formulate their business plan and which will allow us to build their capacity as well. In terms of let's say for example like occupational health and safety, containment improvement, the transportation improvement and influence standards and everything. So then we are helping the local government to track their expenditures where we will know whether they are spending in terms of planning or not, whether the support came as expected or not and what can we do to improve the investment inside the local governments. So till now the household sanitation only has been major in terms of sanitation services, there are very few service providers in sanitation landscape, mostly on-site sanitation practices. So once the regulation is formulated, that is in draft states, once the regulation is formulated it will be our responsibility to build the sanitation service providers through the licensing and everything. And only few, if you cause loss management improvement, management units. So once the capital investment goes there, we will try to track the institutional data as well and only Kathmandu Valley has the wastewater treatment unit and operation. So because of that one, the service providers related data that I showed in the water supply facilities are not available to us in sanitation facilities but as soon as the regulation will be in the field. This kind of data will come inside the unwashed mias. So this is the wastewater influence standard that federal government has approved so far. And from this we can see there is a need for the utility, there is a need for the influence standard monitoring, there is a need for the containment monitoring, there is a need for the transportation monitoring. There is a need for the monitoring for the whole sanitation value chain. As I mentioned before, we can customize the KPIs for the service providers. For example, we can talk about the service coverage, we can talk about service level, accessibility, reliability and operation and management process related indicators such as like how they handle the asset management. This can fall under the technical operation, how they are doing the financial management, inspection and organizational management inside that operator. So this is under the draft regulation which is allowing us to build the management information system which is allowing us to help them develop their own business plan based on those KPIs. So a few way forwards that I'm putting on is we can use secondary data sets also, not only the primary data set and this can come from the beginning. For example, low income community can be one of those data sets are already in other data platforms and if we can make the overall data platform interoperable those kind of data sets can come inside our system. The categorization of LIC can be made based on that one and we can easily integrate it into the National Wash MIS. The one thing that is creating the hindrance in overall planning is the suitability analysis of the technologies because this can be double pitted, this can be vehicles loss management or this can be wastewater. And based on that one, the planning cost can vary on capital investment, on operation investment. So the suitability analysis is going to be very much important for us to plan the sanitation service and integration inside and wash MIS will be also important. And based on our water supply example where we are trying to develop the utilities career path, we are trying to help them develop the business plan. We are trying to help the KPIs and also we are trying to develop the tariff calculator so that the local government would be able to fix the tariff for the operators as well. So this is from my side. Any questions will be welcome later on. Thank you very much. Thank you Rajit ji. This was excellent in terms of capturing both the links to GMP which I think earlier Rick talked about but also very much to your own plans and investment and how does monitoring system link to all this. I think it was excellent presentation. Let me now invite Aditi. Aditi actually works with our center in India and she's been associated with us for the last 10 years and she leads our activities in both communications as well as in terms of improving monitoring systems. And we work both at a state level, national level as well at local level. Over to you Aditi. Thank you Professor Meera. I am going to talk about the performance assessment system for water and sanitation services in India and previous speakers talked about how there is often no data on nationalized data on on-site sanitation systems which are more prevalent or the need to track the impact of investment. And plan for investments in infrastructure and pass also touches upon some of those issues, some of those solutions for India. When pass was initiated in 2009 and was housed at SEPT University and at the time it was conceptualized that was a period of major investments in infrastructure in water and sanitation in India but at that time very little was known about the impacts that this infrastructure was doing on the improvement in service levels. And of course you cannot try and improve what you cannot even measure. So the experience of our team was that data was available, a lot of data was available with the cities who were mandated to provide these services but it was very disaggregated and not in a usable format. It was paper based and never analyzed and that is what pass tried to work on. It conceptualized moving from a vicious cycle of no measurement, no monitoring and deteriorating services to constant measurement and monitoring of performance with some agreed upon indicators and setting the goals and priorities which will lead to continuous improvement. And with that COS developed this pass SLB plus framework which touched upon these four sectors water supplies, sanitation, solid waste, storm water and had indicators on around five thematic areas and there were 32 key performance indicators and many other local drill down indicators for measuring and monitoring service delivery. Pass was not just an exercise by the university it was also aligned with the national service level benchmarking initiative by government of India and was developed with a lot of review of international and Indian efforts, stakeholder consultations etc. And we also attempted to localize the indicators and suit them suit the framework to local context. And like I said, it was not a university driven exercise it was, it was owned by the government and we made a lot of efforts to work with the central state and city level governments. It was aligned to the national service level benchmarking initiatives and institutionalized through MOUs and we work with the government to provide support on various government users and regulatory agencies and in using the data. As you can see these are the indicators across each of the service chains of the sectors and there were 32 indicators. And like I said, there was an attempt to localize or suit this to Indian context where we realize a lot of cities did not have sewer networks and on site systems were very prevalent. So this set of sand benchmarks were introduced which you know also showed service levels on on site systems and there was an attempt to include indicators on equity and the coverage in specially in slums. And this was not a one off exercise and the idea was to do this at scale. And we realized that we required some digital systems to reduce the human effort and the geographical effort that is required to move at scale. And for that we developed this industry academic partnership with the Tata consultancy services and developed an online portal pass.org.in which consisted of an online module which cities could use to self report, you know, sit in their cities and just report themselves, but also had a validation checks to keep, you know, the quality of data in check. And with this online module, we try to provide training to all these participating cities and roll out in many states and collect this data annually, and also try and, you know, verify some part of it on ground. The results of these are published by the cities by the states as part of as part of Gazette. And over the years the result is that the first exercise took one one and a half years to collect the first round of data and now we see that after many years this in two months we are able to, you know, finish this annual exercise for all cities. And we are not just collecting the data, collecting and accumulating data, the data we've made it digital, so we've made it into digital information. But then in order to use it there is a need to have it in a format that is, you know, that could provide some insights and so we have developed all these dashboards which are focused on different stakeholders and different purposes that use this big repository of data to provide some insights into how in how services can be improved. And this information has found a wide range of users for data driven governments from government agencies to researchers to financial institutions and also regulators and consultants. And it's not just reporting and improving on the services. We have there have been over the years there have been efforts to move this from just service, you know, looking at service delivery to looking beyond into you know the using this data to look at the SDG performance or to move into assessing CVIS, citywide inclusive sanitation or ESG assessment or credit worthiness of cities using some of the, you know, local action indicators and also to look at water governance in context of climate change. The reason one of the reasons this has sustained so far is because of the government support and the government institutionalization and this has also been institutionalized through intergovernmental fund transfers and the publication of this information every year by the cities is mandated by the the the Finance Commission which dictates these intergovernmental fund transfers and that has resulted in sustaining this program for so long. Not so now that we have a system in place for measuring and regular monitoring of data efforts have also been made over the years to look at data quality and as I mentioned, the system looks has a system has built in validation checks to look at quality of data but also that there are modules to look at the reliability of data for example in terms of whether the information that you are putting it whether it is a you know rough guesstimate by the city officials or it is backed by primary household service and over the years with efforts and training we have seen that you can see on the right side information for Gujarat we have seen that from reliability D there has been a lot of improvement towards reliability A which is you know data records that are updated regularly based on very best available procedures. And if we talk about inclusive if we talk about data strengthening or data governance for urban sanitation the the latest prevailing theory of changes citywide inclusive sanitation and even though pass is in its 15th year now and see this is relatively new we can see that many aspects most of the aspects of CVS are reflected in our pass and can be used to measure the CVS elements and to look at monitoring beyond you know city level pass provides this system to look at monitoring at city level and it has triggered many more monitoring systems that go beyond city level and look at sanitation monitoring across the service chain to look at how services provided for onsite systems how data is collected how private operators are involved and we have looked and we have tried to develop more monitoring systems such as these three are mentioned here which look at you know how we can look at what type of septic tanks are available in the city and we have also looked at Sani tap which can do custom questionnaires to do that we have Sani track which can look at end-to-end monitoring of dislodging of septic tanks and we have Sani chatbot which is a you know WhatsApp based text based monitoring system for looking at the functioning of FSTPs and to conclude over the years pass has sustained it was not a pilot it operated at scale and you can see here how it has scaled up from you know beginning with 400 cities to over 1000 cities now and has sustained for many years and yeah that that I will conclude there over to you, Professor Meera. Thanks Aditi. This is of course an activity that we have been involved in from the center and we worked with as Aditi said worked with state government as well as national government in taking forward this whole idea and sustaining it over the years. So thanks very much Aditi. Let me open let me before I open up for question and answer. I just wanted to highlight that a lot of people participants have put in links to various documents that they have worked on which relate to the kind of discussions that we had. So it would be good to take a look and download whatever you think are likely to be useful for you. May I have everybody's let me start with a question I think that has been put on the question chat. And it's put to you Rick in terms of that you highlighted some data in your presentation in terms of the data that is missing. But what are the other key challenges that you think are needed in terms of and let me have embellished this question a bit that the kind of examples that you saw from the three countries in terms of kind of data systems kind of efforts that different governments are making both in terms of developing their plan but also introducing monitoring systems and so on. So what do you see as a good linkage between the two. Thank you Mira and I'm happy to start. But I think really the national partners here are in a better position to talk about the key challenges for strengthening data systems because that's what they're doing. But I can reiterate that at least one of the challenges for SDG monitoring at least is that a lot of the information that are collected at the local scale are not aggregated to the national scale. Maybe they're not covering the entire population. And I think there's a real question about who has access to the data and and the ability to use it. So I'm very happy to see the open data portals in in in the three countries that have been participating today. I do want to reiterate that regulators are an excellent way for data on services to be collected and made publicly available. And Mira I take your point that maybe in these countries there aren't independent regulators in the way that there are in some of the African countries. But still even without a formal independent regulatory body there can be institutions that form perform the roles of regulation. And that can still help in both making data publicly available and improving service delivery. So the specific types of data. I mean I mentioned that for these countries apart from India we didn't have national data on centralized wastewater treatment. But more generally I think data on the onsite sanitation is what's really lacking and especially just on that you know on the facility itself. How well is it constructed and how well is it containing wastes. I see I see more focus on FSM and trucking and FSTPs then on just you know is that thing really a septic tank and is it really containing the wastes. But I'd like to hear from others and also batsy. I think you had some some reflections on this topic to share as well. Yeah so I think one of the biggest challenges like to two kind of infancy periods that we need to look upon and start handling the challenge. The first one is the governance infancy because we are talking mostly service riders from the local governments angle. But I think the major capacity and major knowledge development and everything falls under the federal government's responsibility. So it's like how you trickle down those capacity building initiative to local governments becomes very much important. And also it should be the realization of local governments that the system's data is going to impact them is going to be like a biggest challenge. And maybe that is also the biggest opportunity that we can that we can use. Similarly, the service riders infancy also plays role. For example, I was talking about the right now the sanitation services are not even licensed in the absence of regulation. So how do we manage to bring them inside the regulatory landscape and how we can use those operational data in order to make ourselves better is going to be very much important. So once the service riders are aligned, the regulators are not the one which are which will going to be enforcing them to operate but will be the one who will be facilitating them to operate according to business plan. So rather than being enforcing how the government system becomes facilitating towards the service rider to bring the data forward is going to be very much a way forward. I think to cope with that challenge, I think. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. I think she did you want to come in. Thank you very much actually regaining the data collection that is the another part and but establishing a sustainable value chain of the West management that is another part. This is actually said it is really correct in South Asian region in Bangladesh, you know that from the higher end I mean from government and service provider level for the rural and also for the city corporations or the municipalities So okay, under project based activities the development works are going on but after completion of this project, you know, that the acceptance see and sustaining the development activities and providing their every components data to the data preserving center. That is not we are finding in a good shape. Yes, establishing regulatory body. It's a huge challenge still now, but before that, for Bangladesh context, development of sustainable service is also very, very much important. Yes, we are doing a lot. Our different organizations, all the sector partners are really coming forward for providing the facilities from my previous experience without giving a certain services or whatever activities for this improvement of the value chain. It will not be actually sustainable. So, after strengthening the local government institutions, the root level, the villages that rural the Periyava and Starbucks, all of those. So, the accountability the responsibility need to be grown fast from their side yes capacity building and awareness campaign program is a huge from our country. Our, we have different MOU with different development partners, the NGS comes forward and we have established a TA hub and CB hub, CB hub means capacity building hub, the other institutions sector partners like S and V what rate all of those are really providing a good job with service and our local government institutions members, the technical members and the political members coming there and getting a knowledge of every components of this value chain, but at the end, what can I say that the service sustaining the service goes to those institutions and providing this information to our central level that is also be strengthened from their side and we the central government just could help them with different phenomena something like this. Thank you. I know it's a balancing between national government and local government and how do you connect the two through better monitoring systems and what is role of each level is very important. I think we have but see right. I hope I'm pronouncing it correct. Would you like to come in with your question. And thank you to all the speakers so just to quickly introduce myself I work with WHO's international network of drinking water and sanitation regulators. And I really just want to reinforce some of the points that have been made around around governance accountability, and really like the point that Rick was mentioning about who this data goes to. And maybe just to preface my segment by saying that when we talk about regulation, I think we're not necessarily referring to an independent regulatory institution, because sometimes that comes further down the path. But what we are talking about is oversight. Ultimately, who has the responsibility of making sure that these services are being delivered that they are inclusive for everyone that they're affordable and that they are quality good quality services and effectively safe. So I think there are a lot of countries that we can learn from learn from in this space in that they might not have established independent regulatory institutions, but they are conducting this oversight and that's a good starting point. But specifically when it comes to data, I think the key point emphasizes that ultimately the back has to stop with someone and someone has to make sure that I've gathered all this data. And we're able to understand what is happening in the sector relative to our own policy goals and where do we need to adjust. And like Rick said, regulators or persons with responsibility of oversight are really well placed to do that. I'm aware that there are some efforts that have been made to establish these entities of oversight in Bangladesh, in Nepal and in Odisha state in India. But more importantly, also thinking about how that can be done at a regional level so that there are more regional approaches to this oversight. How do we harmonize indicators that are being used for regulating overseeing sanitation and drinking water services, making sure that as a region we're all moving towards the same goal. Thank you. Thanks. I don't think there are any specific questions if you want to come in. I have my personal opinions in terms of this whole regulatory perspective. But maybe I don't should not really go into that here. But I think what is coming out very clearly and maybe Rajit and others can and she she can come in as to that it is true that to have effective monitoring and effective data system, there has to be oversight by some agency. Whether that agency can be part of the existing government structure itself and which is what I thought I heard from both to some extent from India and in Nepal. Bangladesh one seems more complex and the other two countries but so there is oversight. The question of isolating or identifying clearly who these agencies are what their roles could be and how does the monitoring system support performing this functions better. So that is something that we really need to identify and highlight and understand better also because I think the whole regulatory perspective is very much linked to independent service providers. And that is not something that is likely to be the case in South Asia to a great extent that it's not that there are other major issues seems to be that there are multiple service providers at the local level. And I think what Rajit was also highlighting the clarity in terms of who is providing the services local government or private service providers and what is their relationship. These are issues that need to become part of the monitoring system itself and part of in a way indirectly whatever we call it regulation or supervision or whatever we term that we do certainly. I think there were a lot of questions in terms of data quality improvements and that's something that I don't know what efforts have been made in these three countries as well as from. Rick and much derived from your experience from Africa also that how can data systems be improved and the quality of monitoring actually can contribute because that is why to some extent critical to really to have belief in the kind of data that is generated also. I have two hands up, Rajit and then Rick, Rajit go ahead. Rick you want to go. Go ahead, Rajit. Okay, so just wanted to highlight one of the things we are planning to do it is in research phase but I think it will come good. So what we did was like we're capturing the geo reference data and there were like a lot of images which which were used in order to achieve the geo referencing right but when we started collecting the data we knew that these image sources also can be one form of data sources. If we properly do the image processing will we can see where are the data risk. So for example, like if one tap if one tap of if one water tap is broken in image and someone has put this is a this is in good condition. This data to these two data are violating and image processing can easily say this data is violating this these are the like risk of violation of that this has a risk in terms of quality of data. So this way we can create the data patches which are like which are which are more risky data sets and there we can we can focus more on validation. So in sanitation for example like in the public toilet so the toilet pan is not clean as it should be, but if the data is coming like it is clean, and if the image is there. So the validation would be a lot more easier so I think we need to we can use some innovative solutions and validating the data and machine learning and image processing can also be one of the examples that we can push forward. That is Nepal's case so just wanted to highlight that maybe there can be other examples also, but this is one of the case from Nepal. Thank you. Yeah. I'm the question of data quality so one of the questions was is digitization the way to ensure data quality. And I think digitization is really important, but and it certainly increases data accessibility but not necessarily quality. And it relates to this this tension I see between the types of information you can get from routine household surveys, and the types of information you can get from routine administrative data systems, and there's a transition. And I think the three countries here are at stages of that transition. If we look at, you know the high income countries. They don't collect data on wash in household surveys they have comprehensive administrative systems and the very low income countries. They don't have any administrative system so it's only household surveys, but these countries they're in transition. So, I think there are challenges when you try to build up an administrative data source. One around data quality one one challenges around just geographic scope and are you really capturing everyone, and especially as administrative data sets are in their early days. There are data quality problems, you know it's the the stronger performing local government institutes that give data and then the weaker ones don't give data so then the data aren't representative it takes time to get to a place where you have reliable administrative data. And I think in all three of these countries you're you're making steps towards that and advancing it. I think ideally there's a primary reliance on routine administrative data, but with some kind of ground true thing, or you mentioned validation, you know spot checks. Just go to the field, whether that's households or service providers and check that what you're getting from your main source of data is really reliable because, again, especially when the systems are new. You know, there are incentives to take shortcuts or to say things are better than they are so they're there challenges with data validity in the early days of administrative data systems. Did you want to commit and also if you want to highlight more the links related to possibilities of climate and sanitation and how would you contribute to that. I also first I wanted to again touch on the digit digitization and the technology aspects while technology and digitization does not necessarily you know mean better quality data but it also but it provides pathways to improve the quality of data and I mentioned the system of you know data mentioning the data reliability in the past module while that means manually you know putting in reliability ABC. There are also a parallel system of automatic data validation checks so there are around 300 you know formulas or data checks that check the quality of data. So if you mentioned X number of households in this you've reported X number of households last year you cannot you know it just shows a warning that you cannot show a lower number of households or connections this year. So those kind of checks the amount of groundwater you were extracted cannot be more than the total amount of water you know production you have reported this year it enables those kind of pathways. The other thing is it also enables you know the human the human mistakes of the human oversight it eliminates that that could happen so for example when we worked in sanitation and monitoring the the. Dislugging services in in a few cities they used to work with log books or even you know the the the provision of water supply they work with log books with you know how much time the water has been supplied how much time the pumps have been working or how many times. Dislugging truck went to this house but then as soon as we introduced an app to monitor this monitor this service. We could you know suddenly start collecting automate collecting the geolocation and then we could track whether this disludging has happened and whether it has gone to the correct place or not we could automate checking that and we do not have to physically check it so it provides pathways. And to touch on the aspects of climate while climate is a very important topic right now and there is there is still you know evidence building on how sanitation contributes or is helpful in mitigation efforts while there is you know evidence is still building. We do know that you know work in sanitation would be very very much important in climate adaptation and at this point there is a big need to focus on that because the ill effects of climate change are very much visible and impact sanitation and water so that is how climate comes in in this sector at this point. Thanks Abiti. I don't see any hands up. I had a sort of small query to put to all the panelists that everybody talked of the need for household survey on a regular basis and that they should be good they should be local data available. In all the three countries that we looked at and I assume even in Africa this would be true that property tax is a major source of income and there is regular household surveys that are done for updating property tax database. It's once in three years once in four years this is taken up in across all cities in India at least I assume that this will be true in Nepal Bangladesh and so on also. Would that be a possibility to consider so it's not the kind of surveys that Rick and team depend on in terms of surveys that are representative of through appropriate statistical method selected but property tax is 100% survey that you will get. And it's done every three to four years in all in India across all six states all cities this is being done. But we never attempted to tap this source to gather more and better information about water and sanitation not only and in fact to some extent solid waste also it would be possible to do. And whether any thought has been given to this we've made some attempts but still need to do much more but it would be interesting to hear whether something like this would be possible in Bangladesh and Nepal also. She should go. Yeah, you have rightly mentioned actually. You know that. I think it's time because where there is no service household survey is the primary tools to get information and collecting data preserving the real sin, you can say the situation analysis so when after getting this information when development activities actually we are conducting, let's say not so huge skill but gradually in one project, according to my experience in the three municipalities project, we have established the complete value chain for 11 municipalities. So now after getting the baseline database. So now establishing this complete value chain the automatically the informations are coming from the municipalities so no need to get the information by again household survey so yes we are thinking that at certain stage we will provide the service and gradually those information automatically will come from every household and from every component of the value chain that's why we have the expanded version of the IMS for the every municipalities and collecting the household data, whether they are getting quality water whether they are getting the West management services, both the effects and municipal solid waste. So these are under a trial basis already we have completed. And the municipalities they're doing well and based on this service some other entrepreneurs are coming forward and the municipalities also getting habituated on it. So I think if this concept can be expanded to other municipalities. I think the better informations will be gathered and collected preserved and no need to again and again the baseline survey. Yeah, thanks yeah that should certainly be looked at. I think I'm being told to do final remark. I thought it was better to get final remarks from all of you but every I am supposed to do. I think it can I can you please remove the slide so I can at least see everybody faces it's much better. I think it was a great discussion. I don't think that we will come to any conclusions and I don't think it was expected that you would come to a conclusion through just one webinar like this but I think it raised many important questions and it is excellent to learn about what's happening, both at the global level from JMP, which we know about but it was good to hear it. The kind of processes that they've also adopted, as well as the country level experiences, and I hope that I w a and our Institute will take this forward in terms of how do you build on the kind of discussions that we had and how do you go one step forward in terms of whether it is through a regulator or whether through some kind of a reporting agency, whether through household surveys or I am that you are talking about or the kind of in-wash system that Nepal has introduced so thank you very much everybody and I think we've managed to retain most of our participants in the thing so hopefully it was very interesting. Okay, thank you for the opportunity. No, and we look forward to doing this again maybe a few months down the line. Thank you very much.