Guinea-Bissau’s Open Defecation-Free (ODF) Journey: Harnessing mWater for Sanitation Data Management
Written by Binepe Bwambale, narrated by Christopher Kingsley
Figure 1. A map of Guinea-Bissau’s ODF status: Areas that are green mean they have all declared ODF, grey indicates no visits done at all, and red means a low percentage of communities certified ODF.
In the heart of West Africa, Guinea-Bissau is developing a digital approach that is shaping how the country addresses one of its most pressing challenges—sanitation. Central to this case study is the innovative use of the mWater platform, which is being leveraged within the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) framework to empower communities in achieving and sustaining open defecation-free (ODF) status, spearheaded by UNICEF in collaboration with local NGOs and the government (Ministry of Natural Resources, DGRH), the country has set an ambitious goal of making Guinea-Bissau open defecation-free (ODF) by 2030.
Achieving this requires a combination of efforts from multiple partners and innovative approaches. The ODF program allows multiple organizations to come together with multiple activities across different regions, all working towards these targets. The question was clear: How could UNICEF ensure all stakeholders were on the same page, working towards the common goal of a fully ODF Guinea-Bissau?
A Digital Lifeline for Sanitation Management
Initiated in 2012, the program began experimenting with methods and learning from early challenges. However, by 2018, the CLTS program gained momentum, scaling rapidly; it became evident that traditional methods of tracking progress—relying on outdated maps and sporadic field reports—were inadequate. The last national census in Guinea-Bissau was conducted in 2009, and the data it produced was obsolete and riddled with inaccuracies. The challenge was clear: to effectively coordinate the efforts of multiple NGOs, government bodies, and international partners working towards ODF on one platform. The answer to this challenge came in the form of the CLTS MIS, a digital tool designed to bring clarity, transparency, and efficiency to the program's operations.
The CLTS MIS is a set of digital dashboards developed in mWater to track and coordinate the efforts of various stakeholders, ensuring that every village and household is accounted for in the march toward a healthier, cleaner Guinea-Bissau.
The CLTS system is built as shown in the framework below.
The CLTS MIS operates through a structured workflow that begins with data collection. Field officers equipped with mobile devices conduct surveys and input data directly into the system, ensuring that information is captured accurately and promptly at the partnership level. Through the system, NGOs input data from the field directly into the platform, allowing for immediate updates on the status of CLTS activities. This data, ranging from NGO activities to government certifications, is then reviewed through a rigorous approval process involving several dashboards designed to monitor progress at different levels, as shown in the diagram above. This real-time data is then used to generate detailed charts, graphs, and maps that track the progress of sanitation efforts across the country.
How it works
The primary goals of this MIS system are to track NGO activities,track government verification activities, manage partnership agreements, and assess the overall progress of CLTS) toward the 2030 goals. The data collection process is structured with surveys and data inputs on the left, followed by survey approvals, and finally, monitoring dashboards. Data only appears on the monitoring dashboards once it has been approved. The MIS has separate dashboards for monitoring partnership agreements, one for government partners, and another for NGOs.
The CLTS promotion workflow involves a minimum of three mandatory visits: pre-triggering (baseline assessment), triggering (the actual promotion session), and post-triggering (follow-up). Based on the community’s progress, additional visits may be conducted. Once a community is ready to self-declare as ODF, this status is recorded and shown in a dashboard, enabling planning for further field visits.
The MIS mirrors this workflow with a comprehensive CLTS survey on the system's left side (check the diagram above), allowing users to specify which promotion stage they are engaging in. Every NGO community visit is registered, and basic information is recorded to track their activities. During the approval process, the information input by NGOs during the self-declaration is compared with information input by government officials input during the CLTS declaration visits, streaming the survey approval/rejection process.
A key lesson learned during the development of this system was the importance of creating feedback loops. Initially, when the system was designed primarily to track NGOs and government activities, data quality was poor. However, once the MIS administrators began feeding survey data back to the NGOs through a partnership activities monitoring dashboard, the NGOs became more invested in supervising their workers, leading to significant improvements in data quality. Now, the data is consistent and reliable, aligning with other data sources when available.
Figure 2. Graph on mWater showing the NGO's data on ODF communities
Every survey is also subjected to an approval process, which varies depending on the implementing partner's capabilities. More capable partners can approve their surveys, but UNICEF serves as a fallback to ensure that all surveys are self-consistent. This approval process has become a standard procedure for the UNICEF Country Office when interacting with surveys within the mWater space.
The monitoring dashboards provide an overview of progress, and each deployment corresponds to a partnership agreement within UNICEF's internal system. This alignment helps with internal monitoring and reporting, streamlining previously burdensome processes. When it’s time to finalize partnership agreements, the data from mWater can be used to generate reports or to verify the accuracy of the reports submitted by the partners.
Figure 3. Tracking or monitoring visits over a certain period, showing how they progress over time.
After the survey approvals, program monitoring, and partnership monitoring, the data is displayed in a national overview dashboard, which brings it all together.
Figure 4. Section of the National monitoring dashboard showing ODF communities
This is a publicly available dashboard that was part of the early designs by mWater staff. While some modifications have been made, it hasn't changed much over time, and the basic layout remains the same.
This is where UNICEF, external partners, and the government come to see which parts of the country are mostly ODF or which are lacking. You can see, for example, on the map on the first page, that areas that are green mean they have all declared ODF for most of the communities there, whereas parts of the country that are grey indicate no visits at all. Regions in red have a very low percentage of communities declared ODF, and can be targeted in future interventions.
One of the MIS's standout features is its capacity to create national overviews. These overviews allow stakeholders to visualize progress toward the 2030 ODF goal, breaking down data by region, community, and even individual NGO.
Beyond Sanitation: The Broader Impact of CLTS MIS
The project has also seen other unintended positive outcomes; for instance, the system has corrected numerous errors in the national statistics maps, which were previously plagued by inaccuracies due to manual GPS coordinate entries and outdated census data. Now, with the CLTS MIS, the government and NGOs have access to accurate, digitized maps that show the exact locations of communities, health centers, and schools.
A Model for the Future
The idea for the 2030 ODF goal is to cover the whole country, region by region, as shown in the map below.At any given moment, five to seven partners are active in different regions of the country. CLTS activities are currently active across the country, with partners working simultaneously in eastern, southern, and western, as well as around the capital city The islands have a separate implementation strategy and partner because of their unique logistical difficulties.
The map above shows progress over time: darker dots indicate more recent activities, while the lighter dots represent work done further in the past. The initial focus was in Quinara, the region just to the south of the central river mouth, which was declared 100% ODFin 2018
mWater has adopted similar models and has proven successful, as with RUMIS. Uganda is developing the Rural and Urban Management System (RUMIS), a new feature that allows NGOs and other local organizations to automatically share their water point data with the Government of Uganda.
UNICEF is the main funder of the CLTS program in Guinea-Bissau. As the primary driver behind the initiative, UNICEF collaborated with mWater to develop the CLTS MIS, ensuring it was tailored to track the program’s progress, manage data from various NGOs, and facilitate coordination with government agencies. In addition to funding the NGOs involved, UNICEF also took a leading role in managing the system, providing ongoing support to local government officials, many of whom faced challenges in handling the technical aspects of the MIS. Through capacity-building, training, and technical assistance, UNICEF ensures that data collection is accurate and efficient through data quality checks. They provided the overall leadership and oversight for the program.
Making Use of the Data and Success Stories
It is a challenging question to answer whenever we ask how often the governments refer to MIS data generated by partners for their planning. NGOs and other organizations' roles primarily involve ensuring they collect high-quality data and make it accessible to policymakers. However, the extent to which this data is actually used in government planning has been a slow process and a major challenge for many non-government-led MIS. In the case of Guinea-Bissau, the data comes from the Ministry of Natural Resources, and while it could be incorporated into planning by the Ministry of Public Health, this is not happening.
Regardless, internally, at UNICEF, this data is used extensively, primarily to target their interventions. This data is incorporated, along with health center data, into the strategies for CLTS promotion, nutrition planning, and other programs.
“When we target a community for nutrition interventions, we consider whether the community has already gone through processes like ODF or CLTS and water safety planning. This helps us determine which communities might be eligible for further support.” Christopher Kingsley
During the COVID-19 pandemic and an Ebola scare in the southeast, UNICEF used its data to quickly identify and target communities that needed immediate attention. Although this wasn't directly related to CLTS data, it was crucial for the WASH in schools program.
“We targeted schools as centers for COVID-19 prevention, using our existing data to efficiently distribute supplies and support to the right locations”. Christopher Kingsley
This success story demonstrates how this data has been used to guide internal planning and responses, even if its influence on government decisions remains unclear. Therefore, to improve public health outcomes and overall governance, it is imperative that governments embrace Management Information Systems because they provide crucial data that can significantly enhance planning and decision-making processes.
Breaking the Cycle: Tackling Human Resource and Funding Challenges in MIS Development
Despite its successes, the implementation of the CLTS MIS has not been without challenges. The system requires significant buy-in from local government officials, some of whom lacked the technical expertise to manage and interpret the data effectively. This led to UNICEF taking a more central role in maintaining the MIS, ensuring that the system remained functional and that the data continued to flow.
Furthermore, the CLTS program in Guinea-Bissau is unique in that it falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Natural Resources rather than the Ministry of Health. This unusual alignment has required the CLTS MIS to navigate complex political landscapes, ensuring that data is shared and utilized across different government departments.
One key challenge noted in this case study is the impact of staff turnover on the effectiveness of MISs. When key personnel responsible for developing and maintaining an MIS leave, there is often a slowdown in progress. This issue is shared across different regions and projects where systems have struggled due to the loss of crucial human resources. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that these systems are often developed for government use, but the adoption by the government is slow, leaving the burden of maintaining the MIS on the organization and specific individuals. When funding runs out, or staff moves on, the use of these platforms becomes limited.
In the case of the CLTS MIS, the team has been trying to find someone within UNICEF or the government to train and pass on this knowledge to, but it's challenging. Ideally, handing it over to a long-term country staff member would be best. However, this is hindered due to limited personnel with the necessary engineering or information management backgrounds, which makes it difficult for them to pick up an MIS. On the government side, frequent changes in personnel and low pay make it hard to retain skilled staff who could manage these systems effectively. As soon as someone gains the necessary skills, they often leave for better-paying jobs elsewhere. These systemic problems are challenging to address and cut across many systems.
Regarding platform-related challenges, the most significant issue the project has faced is the lack of funding. The team would like to develop many features, but convincing donors to provide the necessary resources has been difficult.
Conclusion
The CLTS MIS is a shining example of how a well-conceived management system can catalyze significant improvements in public health. Guinea-Bissau is on track to achieve what once seemed impossible: a nation free from the dangers of open defecation. This system, with its innovative design and impactful results, is not just a tool—it is the driving force behind a national movement that is changing lives and setting a new standard for sanitation in the 21st century.