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Title: Water Data Infrastructure for Low-and Middle-Income Countries
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2020
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Abstract: Water is critical to human development and well-being. Its importance is not only captured explicitly in the Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6) regarding universal access to safe, affordable, and adequate water and sanitation, but also is embedded within the goals on energy, food security, poverty, energy, health, disaster risk, and cities. In 2016-2018, the United Nations and World Bank Group convened a High Level Panel on Water to accelerate progress towards SDG6, which identified a number of ways in which such progress was off-track, particularly in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). This panel recommended an agenda to enable stakeholders to make decisions and take action. Prior to decision-making, it is necessary for stakeholders "to understand the quantity, quality, distribution, use, and risks of the water they have." This understanding in turn depends on investments in institutional and technical infrastructure for "water-related data as well as the systems to share, analyze, and take decisions with this data" (United Nations and World Bank 2018). This makes sense-decisions require information based on data. But what data investments need to be made? What should water data infrastructure do? "Water-related" data is collected on many topics by many different actors, each in a different format and quality fit for a different, often highly localized primary use, even if secondary use of such data by other parties may be beneficial. Well-informed decisions may require data to be integrated from many of these different sources. Currently, the typical data-to-decisions cycle can be long, winding, difficult, and full of uncertainty. For example, a regional water infrastructure planner may need to answer many interrelated questions in order to even begin costing out alternative scenarios of water supply improvements in an application to a government agency or donor organization: • How many people live in this region, and how are they spatially distributed among settlements of different sizes? • Where do existing water points serve each of these settlements? What types of water points are they, and what levels of service in terms of water quantity, quality, travel times, and wait times do they provide? What are people paying for water from these points? Where do people retrieve water if not from one of these points? • How much water is being used, including for domestic, agricultural, livestock, and commercial purposes? • What are prevailing rates of waterborne disease in these settlements, and in their vulnerable subpopulations? • What is the potential to increase safely managed water supply quantity? What are the surface and groundwater availability conditions in the
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Authors: Onda, Kyle
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Natural Resource Management, Poverty and Welfare
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