Support for the Establishment of a Monitoring and Reporting System for the Water Sector in Africa – Phase II: Strengthening Capacity Building and Learning

Background 

The AWF supported the African Ministers Council on Water (AMCOW) to establish the Pan African Water, Sanitation Monitoring, and Reporting System in 2013. The system is currently operational and is the first-ever continental automated web-based System that exclusively captures data on water and sanitation across the 54 countries using 44 harmonised progress indicators.  The system has undergone a number of upgrades overtime but continues to face challenges that have compromised its optimal functionality. This includes low capacity by countries to collect quality data and reporting in a timely manner, high turnover of national focal points to consistently provide quality data, weak coordination structures at national level to facilitate data collection, high levels of bandwidth consumption by the system hence causing accessibility challenges by most countries. To address the challenges AMCOW requested additional financial support from AWF to fund the second phase of the project.

Objective

The objective of the project is to support and strengthen monitoring capacity and decision-making processes at national, sub-regional and continental levels in the water and sanitation sector. It is envisaged that ultimately the system will result in a continental wide credible monitoring and reporting system that will regularly provide information on the state of water development and use for decision making by Heads of States and Governments. The action corresponds to the Ngor Declaration on Water Security and Sanitation in 2015 that calls for further strengthening the institutionalization of a harmonized monitoring and reporting system to report on actions taken to implement the commitments. The Ngor Declaration on Water Security and Sanitation integrates the Dakar Declaration on Water Security and the Ngor Declaration on sanitation. It serves as a framework to implement the Africa Water Vision 2025, the continental transformational agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6).

Main components

The project consists of three main components:

(i) strengthen the Pan African Water & Sanitation Monitoring & Reporting System;

(ii) Capacity Enhancement of Stakeholders;

(iii) Project Management and Reporting.

The project will be implemented by AMCOW over a period of 24 months through a project team with specialised technical assistance. 

The project is directly aligned with the Facility’s mission of mobilising resources of water in Africa and the AWF Strategic objective of leveraging investments by enhancing water knowledge through information management, monitoring and evaluation. The proposed project intends to enhance member countries’ capacity in monitoring and reporting under the WASSMO.