Akvo FLOW in Nepal: real time monitoring of WASH services

Service delivery in sanitation has been accelerated with the formulation of National Sanitation and Hygiene Master Plan, 2011 by Government of Nepal that aims to achieve universal coverage by 2017. Functionality and sustainability are prime issues that emerge with a question mark in the sanitation promotion and also sprout issues of behaviour change of communities that have already been declared as Open Defecation Free (ODF) areas. The conventional paper based monitoring is sure to fail in coming up with real time data collection, hence leaving flaws for actual analysis and plans for ways forward. In such situation, mobile based data collection has come up as better option, which gives real time monitoring with Global Positioning System (GPS) reference, provides visualisation of collected data (see Photograph 1 on page 4). This helps in making real time decisions through intelligent analysis of data, which can be also viewed in the maps plotted through use of internet.