Opportunities & pitfalls in using ICT for monitoring

Published on: 01/08/2013

Inexpensive mobile networks, smart phones, and apps. They are already transforming lives and livelihoods across the developing world. Can they transform water services too? In their paper ‘ICT for monitoring rural water services’, authors Nicolas Dickinson and Kristof Bostoen explore this question and offer practical advice on the use of ICT in monitoring.

ICT can make monitoring more effective and efficient by speeding up data collection, enabling better management and analysis, reducing travel requirements, and shortening the time between failure of a water service and corrective action. For service providers and regulators, it can mean better access to more timely information. For consumers, it can means more reliable service and better accountability.

Despite these advantages, the rural water sector has been slow to pick it up—partially because of the barriers of availability and cost, which are now rapidly disappearing, and partially because monitoring itself has not been the priority in many areas. “Understandably countries have been putting their money into expanding service coverage,” says Dickinson. “But to keep those services going, you need monitoring. The growth in cellular networks and the proliferation of inexpensive smart phones are opening up new possibilities for faster, cheaper data collection. We wrote this paper to give governments, donors, NGOs and other stakeholders the best information available on the potential of ICT and how it fits into the bigger picture of monitoring for sustainable services.”

The paper covers:

• opportunities offered by ICT,
• a framework for designing an information system to support sustainable services at scale,
• a description of  ICT tools available and advice on how to choose, and
• recommendations for scaling up information systems.

It also includes to two case studies, one from Burkina Faso and one from Ghana.

Dickinson cautions, “Data is only useful if it leads to better services. It needs to get the right people at the right time and they need some sort of framework for acting on it. Choice of technology is important, but it’s only one factor in developing a successful monitoring system.”

Please see the links below to download the full working paper and a 4-page executive summary.