By Angelica de Jesus, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. Prepared for the Monitoring sustainable WASH service delivery symposium, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 9-11 April 2013.

1. Rapporteur highlights:
“Country-led & country-wide
monitoring” sessions

2. Governments should take the
lead
“We talk about country-led monitoring BUT the government
is really in the driver’s seat. They should be in charge. If you
surrender that, then you are surrendering you’re sovereignty.
And to me, that is unacceptable”.

3. Don’t reinvent the wheel—build
on existing capacity
“We need to build the capacity of different tiers of
government. We need to empower them to play in the
different fields of monitoring.”

4. What about resources?
“Monitoring is messy. It’s a messy, untidy landscape.”

5. Incentives and motivation
“Too many cases focus on producing data but we are not able
to sensitize decision making and civil society when it comes to
the power of data and what you can do with it.”
“Country-led monitoring can be called ‘government-led’, but
we are deliberately calling it ‘country-led’ to stress that
everyone has a role to play”.

6. Formalizing cooperation &
communication
“It’s not a matter of sophisticated or complex monitoring
systems. It’s a matter of cooperation.”

8. Build trust and keep corruption
in mind
“Trust is an important statement in everything that we’re
discussing. But where did the word ‘corruption’ go in this
symposium? Corruption is not a single country issue but an
overall global issue.”

9. Think about the people
“Involve all stakeholders, starting at the grassroots level.”
“Think about the minorities – the hard-to-reach people – as a
first step of the monitoring process.”
“We should remember that communities also play an
important role in monitoring. There should be a mechanism
that thinks about the users. We need to develop systems that
reduce the academic language so that monitoring data &
systems can be understood and used by the communities.”

10. Monitoring is not a goal in itself
“We need to invest in the right priorities, not just monitoring”
“A good monitoring plan helps but it is only one part of service
delivery.”

11. How can we take action?
“Measuring functionality is a first step to triggering action.”

12. Thank you!

13. • What did you get out these sessions?
Key lesson learned?
• What do you think needs to happen
in your country to take country-led
monitoring forward?
• What is your contribution to taking
country-led monitoring forward?