Introduction

In January of 2010, a massive earthquake with a 7.0 magnitude hit Haiti. Nine months later, a cholera outbreak occurred, impacting the lives of 820,000 Haitians. Across the country, existing systems to access clean drinking water were destroyed and in rural areas of departments treatment facilities were stopped due to resource shortages. Prior to the earthquake, Haiti’s government was making steps to reform the water and sanitation sector. However, once disaster struck all efforts transitioned towards emergency response. With assistance from an abundance of international aid organizations, the National Directorate for Portable Water and Sanitation (DINEPA) worked to rebuild its infrastructure. Previous efforts to decentralize water access, sanitation, and hygiene services (WASH) and create self-sustaining local utilities made little progress in the wake of emergency response. In the years following, there have been several efforts to develop the water and sanitation sector in Haiti. Currently, sanitation infrastructure has increased and several local water utilities have found stable financial footing. Among other key players, mWater aided in these developments, creating effective data collections systems to improve management and provide direction in Haiti’s water and sanitation sector. mWater has aided the Haitian water sector to transform from primarily NGO efforts to government-led activity to finally utility level management.

A Brief History of DINEPA and the CDC in Haiti

In 2009, DINEPA identified that an improperly trained and under-staffed rural workforce was a leading institutional problem. In order to immediately improve portable water accessibility and hygiene facilities post-disasters in 2010, DINEPA partnered with the CDC. Haiti is divided into 10 departments that each have 42 arrondissements, which are divided into 144 communes and then into 571 communal sections. To manage the water sector down to the communal level, the CDC introduced a trained team of local rural water and sanitation technicians known as TEPACs. After hurricane Matthew hit the southern claw of Haiti in 2016, TEPACs were greatly used to assess water infrastructure damage and aid in emergency response. DINEPA is now working with the Haitian government to provide drinking water to households that do not have access to potable water from a community water system or municipal source.

NGO Leadership: Rural Activities

FRAPE and Commune Action Planning: Haiti Outreach

Once the CDC and DINEPA’s combined efforts in emergency response in the wake of the 2016 hurricane had subsided, progress to improve the foundations of Haiti’s WASH sector resumed. Working closely with DINEPA, the NGO Haiti Outreach successfully mapped 3 of the 10 departments’ public access water points in Haiti. In addition, Haiti Outreach, working in conjunction with DINEPA and local authorities, developed a set of commune action plans to achieve universal access to basic water service. The plan uses proxy indicators that parallel the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were implemented in 2015. It is built on two major goals: to increase the impact of WASH interventions and to empower local partners to take control of their WASH development and drive towards universal access. The plan consisted of a multilayer approach. This approach performed housing data digitization using google imagery to create a georeferenced housing layer used to estimate access and target interventions. Next, using mWater’s software, FRAPE (function, responsibly managed, sanitation coverage, potable, inspected) surveys were conducted to visit every water point and collect data. It was important that data field collection was done by water agency staff and local authorities to reinforce local capacity and ownership of the system. Lastly, local partners validated the data to verify for correctness and completeness.

By 2018, the remaining 7 departments were mapped by DINEPA, with support from UNICEF, World Bank, and IDB. In the same year, the Université d’Etat d’Haïti (UEH) in partnership with the University of Florida (UF) held a water summit called “VisiEAu 2018” in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The summit produced four key messages around a call to action to drastically improve the water sector in Haiti. Among them was a dire call for a data sharing management system. There was a clear need for software that allowed data to be collected, openly shared, and analyzed among local, national, and international partners.

Governmental Leadership

Under the public water utility system in Haiti, each department produced unique problems. In urban areas like Canaan, Cap Haïtien, Jérémie, Les Cayes, and Mirebalais, suffered from common issues faced by utilities in low-resource countries like non-revenue water loss, poorly trained and ill-equipped staff, a lack of preventative maintenance measures, flat tariffs for water services, and virtually no standard equipment to make repairs. Help from private sector attempted to aid in access, but these services proved to be unaffordable for those that often needed it the most: rural areas with little existing infrastructure and low-income populations. While regulation was needed at a national level, engagement was needed at a local level.

International Efforts towards Decentralization: USAID’s Water and Sanitation Program Activity

In 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) created the Water and Sanitation (WATSAN) project to improve water and sanitation services in urban areas of Haiti. With this support, DINEPA introduced a data monitoring and management system for piped water supplies (SAEP). The SAEP management system monitors urban and rural water utilities. Monitoring is conducted by TEPACs which were used as communal WASH technicians to integrate rural water utilities into the system.

Utility Level Management

Using semi-private municipal water utilities called Centres Techniques d’Exploitation (CTEs), DINEPA worked with regional water authorities (OREPAs) to implement models for managing and monitoring CTEs in urban areas. Each utility submits a report to DINEPA, which provides information on the technical, commercial, and financial status of the utility. USAID utilized mWater’s cloud-based system to upload data on the water production, operating costs, and sales revenues of the CTEs. By training the CTEs on mWater, it allowed for up-to-date water utility information while maintaining operational autonomy at the utility level. This proved to be an effective step towards decentralization. The mWater platform allowed data to be shared between all echelons: local partners CTEs, regional OREPA offices, national DINEPA offices, and international partners like the USAID Water and Sanitation Program.

A view of the CTE des Cayes water system in the mWater Portal

A Look into the Platform

The following features are currently being developed by the project and planned to be rolled out to all 150,000 of mWater’s users.

Connectedness

With CTE commercial data systems already integrated into the platform, detailed information on managed data regarding clients and fee collection is synced live with mWater so that utilities can visualize their commercial data in the same platform as everything else.

Asset Management

Users can manage water system assets in a standard manner, from the level of sophistication of water points to large water utilities. This includes data on assets like pipes, customers, pumps, and reservoirs. This feature also allows the condition and status of water points to be tracked to understand where repairs are required.

Spatial Calculations

The spatial join function in mWater allows users to make automatic calculations based on the distance between various entities. These can be between water points and communities, schools and surveys, health facilities and hand washing facilities, pipes and households, boreholes and shapefiles.

Mobile Friendly Data Visualizations

Users are able to optimize consoles, dashboards, and maps for viewing on any size screen like mobile, tablet, laptop or all of the above.

Training Center

Documentation Management

Allows users to follow a free, self-paced course with video and text lessons, quizzes, and a certificate of completion.

Allows users and organizations to manage documents directly in the platform. Utilities have their own sub-folder for storing documents related to their system such as plans, contracts, and yearly reports.

The SIEPA System

In 2020, with more involvement from mWater, DINEPA updated its data management system to the Système Intégré d'Information sur l'Eau Potable et l'Assainissement (SIEPA). The SAEP management system is simply one module within the larger SIEPA system. This management information system is designed to cover the entire Drinking Water and Sanitation (EPA) sector in rural and urban areas, as well as water resources and the management of water services. The system has two different types of data: Sites and Forms.

Sites: Are locations that can be tracked over time eg Water Point, Building, Health Center, etc.
Forms: Are used to track site information over time eg Water Point Tracking, Public Building Tracking, etc.

An example of a form that is regularly utilized is the SAEP monitoring. This system combines a system of performance indicators (SIPs), CTE monthly reports, an inventory of SAEPs, and HTH tracking. The CTEs use the advanced form, the TEPACs use the basic form to monitor the SAEPs managed by the CAEPAs and the POs use the basic or advanced form. Based on indicators defined by the product owner, mWater has been able to generate statistics based on maps showing water accessibility, quality, and availability by department, municipality, and communal section. Regarding sanitation, SIEPA tracks and maps the percent of household living in an ODF-verified neighborhood or locality, the percent of ODF-certified localities, the percent of households that have access to an improved non-shared toilet, percentages of toilet blocks, the number of households benefiting from sludge treatment service. Instructure is mapped and updated using the same SIEPA system. Service management is also tracked by area by the percentage of grievances solved, their recovery, new connections made, and the volume of water produced and distributed across Haiti. To ensure data submitted by TEPACs is correct and updated, each OREPA must go through and approve the monthly reports for all SAEPs in the pale region each month. In event of an emergency, the system is used to manage emergency response data on water points, shelter, CTED product sellers, treated water kiosks, water vendors by truck, and water collection companies. In response to the earthquake in Haiti on August 14th, DINEPA used this to quickly roll out a data module to inform the emergency response.

Current Usage

With over 500 DINEPA users and over 200 external partner users from local authorities, funders, NGOs, and the general public, SIEPA has made large strides to improve the WASH sector in Haiti. Over 60,000 water points, 1,000 water systems, 2,500 schools, and 700 health facilities have been successfully mapped across the 10 departments. The percent of the urban population who have access to drinking water is 68% with the highest departments being Nord, Nord-Est, and Center.

The Future of the Haitian WASH Sector: Emerging Functionality

With funding from the World Bank, DIENPA has been working with mWater to take SIEPA to the next level. The goal is to create a strong institutional information network that seeks to identify, analyze, disseminate, use, and store data and information for management, planning, policy formulation and decision-making. This can be achieved by bringing together the multiple modules in SIEPA into a single, user-friendly interface. This is currently being developed and will fully be deployed by the end of this coming September. mWater and DINEPA hope it will be a multi-stakeholder site for DINEPA staff beginning with local technicians to the general director, water utility companies, NGOs, donors, and the general public. Advanced functionality like a custom MIS site and app configuration allow for versatility in usage. New features like data fields that assign the update and approval of site data to specific users will allow managers to track the progress of regular monitoring on a user-by-user basis. mWater’s software has allowed open communication and data sharing between local, national, and international partners. It has worked to decentralize WASH services and engage the local water utilities in Haiti. Despite the recent improvement efforts, there is still more work to be done. But with DINEPA leading the charge, achieving full access to potable water and sanitation facilities is on Haiti’s horizon.

Case Study: mWater in Haiti