Dear all,

Thank you for contributing to our discussion and sharing your thoughts on Civil Society's role in monitoring.

The summary is now available here .

- Katrin

Dear Hanna, dear Graham, dear discussion participants,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful contributions to our discussion on the SDGs and civil society's role in monitoring.

The official part of the discussion is hereby closed but you are of course welcome to continue to post in this thread.

Next week, I will provide a summary of the posts published up until now and will inform you here how to access it once it is available.

Best,
Katrin

Thanks, Katrin and others for organizing this thematic discussion.

I think that as we go forward and work on the global goals, civil society will have an important role to play in advocacy, measurement, and accountability. Strong networks of actors that are engaged on these topics will be important to ensuring that we implement the right solutions in the smartest way possible. Strong civil society partnerships and collaboration will be essential. Furthermore, I think that having forums, such as this one, to discuss, debate, and question help push us forward.

Thanks for the opportunity to have a conversation about this important topic and I look forward to both what people have to say and how we can work together in the future.

Dear all,

Thank you for sharing your experiences and raising questions on this discussion thread so far.

This is just a short notice that the official part of this discussion will end soon. Contributions published during the official part of the discussion will be included in the summary which will be published next week (further information to follow).

You will of course be able to continue the conversation after that point. However, if you would like your ideas and thoughts to be included in the official summary of our discussion, NOW is the time to hit the reply button!

- Katrin

Thanks, Monirul, for bringing up the issue of food hygiene. Certainly food hygiene specifically was discussed by the JMP group when determining which WASH goals/targets/indicators should be promoted.

Like Graham has discussed in terms of the ladder, hygiene can be progressively measured, and ideally measurement of handwashing with soap would progressively lead to measurement of other key areas of hygiene, such as MHM or food hygiene.

There are a few ways that civil society can be involved in promoting hygiene measurement. For instance, individuals can be involved in supporting a petition asking for a hygiene indicator (globalhandwashing.org/sign-a-petition-ca...hygiene-in-the-sdgs/) and organizations can celebrate Global Handwashing Day (www.globalhandwashingday.org) using the theme "Wash your hands for hygiene" as a launching point to ask governments to measure hygiene.

My question for you all now is this: How can the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing help equip you to advocate?

Dear Colleagues,

I have read with interest the previous posts and I think some excellent points have been raised. I think there are many opportunities to promote the monitoring ladder approach and I am sure many of you have some great ideas about how we can do this. I think as a starting point national water partnerships and/or other national institutions, who have an interest in water monitoring can review the various options available within their country. This way a multi-stakeholder group can work closely with the national office of statistics. The key word in my opinion is progressive. It may not be possible to do everything from day one but as momentum is gathered and the various parts of the jigsaw come together we will see a pattern emerging. There will also be great opportunities for south-south sharing particularly within a region or perhaps a unit like a river -basin etc.

Even if a particular indicator doesnt "make it" to the global list there is nothing to stop a national movement from monitoring if it feel it is useful for national planning.

Looking forward to more comments as this session draws to a close

regards
Graham

Thank you for raising this Hygiene Issue. It is very important and it needs to be included in the SDG goals. I am doing an experimental research on Food Hygiene in Rural Bangladesh. The research is on-going. I have implemented Randomized Controlled Trial experiment in providing food hygiene education along with testing household drinking water quality and food preparing utensils. The presence of E.Coli bacteria is tested here. The child anthropometry and the diarrhoea frequency of under five children have been recorded for the analysis. The result will be coming soon. I am attaching a draft abstract about my research.

The food Hygiene Education poster can be found in the following link:

forum.susana.org/forum/categories/92-nut...iene-and-agriculture


I am in support of inclusion of hygiene matters in SDGs. I am raising my hand!

Dear all,

About using community sources for some of the rungs of monitoring, much hope was (and still is) placed in citizen engagement using ICTs. However, many barriers to efficient participation have been identified: government non-responsiveness, methodologies, technical limitation ... So it is indeed and as raised in this forum, about improving CSOs’ participation in the monitoring process but with governments remaining in the driver seat. The key is to find the “links between the "formal" monitoring ladder and the opportunities to engage community-based or other non- traditional monitoring methods into the ladder structure” as suggested by Graham; and I believe that the WASHWatch platform can be part of the solution.

The WASHWatch platform allows CSOs to share findings, which may confront or corroborate government’s reported progress on the different commitments they tabled at the global, regional and national levels. Concretely, the website displays all country commitments and there is a space for citizens to comment on government’s progresses or shortfalls, corroborated by evidence. These comments can be brought to the attention of governments by sector partners in various sectors meetings, and if evidence is strong it will be hard to ignore. That way, governments are made aware of the shortfalls perceived by CSOs and a combination of public pressure and peer pressure can encourage them to take action.

To my point of view, this exercise highlights CSOs’ responsibility to highlight where their government is “underperforming” and ultimately holding them into account.

Finally, as Hanna said, it is still time for CSOs to advocate for better indicators to monitor the Global Goals. The second meeting of the Inter-agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) on 26-28 October 2015 will be crucial. CSOs should concentrate efforts between now and then to advocate for indicators that will ensure equity.(Learn more about WaterAid position paper on Sustainable Development Framework goal indicators ). Also, October 15 is Global Handwashing Day, a perfect opportunity to take actions to make sure Hygiene gets the place it deserves in the Global Goals indicator framework ( here is a good place to get indications on what you/your organization can do to support).

Dear all,

Thank you for sharing your ideas and thoughts on the topic of SDG indicators so far. For those of you who have joined the discussion late, I would like to provide a brief summary of the issues addressed and point to some of the questions that have been raised:

As Graham writes with regard to future monitoring collaborations “As JMP develops and additional monitoring initiatives are developed, the need to work in harmony and avoid duplication is critical. So partnerships in monitoring are called for so that everyone is reading from the same song sheet!”

(1) Where will the resources come from?
-> One way suggested is to make the best use of community-sourced data and see how it can effectively be combined with more traditional forms of data collection.
-> As Lucy points out, however, there is the problem of integrating data from community sources with DHS or census data because community sources are not representative samples and might not apply a standard set of questions.

(2) Concept of "monitoring ladders"
-> Idea that with regard to complex indicators, only a few parameters could be measured initially before progressively advancing up the ladder.
-> It is suggested that the ladder concept could be applied with regard to where and which people are the most at risk because of lack of sanitation progress
-> The concept of monitoring ladders could also be applied with regard to data collection: "formal" monitoring ladder AND engage community-based or other non- traditional monitoring methods into the ladder structure

(3) Global versus regional indicators
Global indicators: all countries report on these
Regional/local indicators: selected by countries and tailored to their context
Hanna suggests that HYGIENE should be included in the list of global indicators and civil society can play a role and advocate for this. See bit.ly/hygieneSDG

(4) Further issues:
- Monitoring and Financing: How will the monitoring be financed?
- Technical assistance for monitoring
- Monitoring and Ownership: implementation of good monitoring frameworks will need to be driven by national governments and ownership is critical.


FURTHER QUESTIONS:
(1) What are ways to get "official" offices of statistics and ministries to become more appreciative of community collected data, understanding its limitations while using it to guide choices etc.? How to overcome/deal with the “standardization” problem?

(2) What are your thoughts on the concept of the monitoring ladder?
(a) Is it a good idea to start to measure a few parameters of a complex indicator and PROGRESSIVELY advance up the ladder? Or does this pose the risk that easy indicators will be favoured over the more difficult, yet more meaningful ones?
(b) Can the concept of the monitoring ladder work and can we use community sources for some of the "rungs"?
(c) Are there examples from other areas of how formal monitoring and community based data can be successfully integrated?

(3) What other sources of data can be used to monitor progress?

(4) How can “official” country institutions be persuaded to more readily accept community-collected information and data?

Dear Dorothee, I fully agree and think the way ahead is to provide links between the "formal" monitoring ladder and the opportunities to engage community-based or other non- traditional monitoring methods into the ladder structure. These methods can interprolate and extrapolate in more formal surveys. The example i like is the use of Remote Sensing of eutrophication to focus sapling and formal surveys.

Dear Graham and all

As pointed out by Lucy one of the main factor hindering community collected data to enter into statistical reports is definitively the "standardisation" problem.

For the purpose of project monitoring within a your own organisation you may overcome this problem by providing guidance for communities how to collect data and by applying requirements and quality control of data to be "accepted".

Would such an approach work for a global monitoring program and to what conditions?
Could it also be integrated in the concept of "monitoring ladder" you mentioned earlier?

Cheers, Dorothee

Thanks Lucy, I fully agree we need to find a way to get "official" offices of statistics and ministries to become more apprecaitive of community collected data, understanding its limitations while using it to guide choices etc. I would like to know if colleagues in JMP and other organizations think this is a good approach ?