Joint Monitoring Programme, WHO/UNICEF

WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program: Water Supply and Sanitation

The water and sanitation series is developed using data from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program for water supply and sanitation (JMP). The JMP reports country, regional and global estimates of progress on drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) since 2000. 

The WSS JMP dataset provides substantial information on water, sanitation and hygiene, broken into national, urban and rural subgroups. Within these subgroups, global estimates are provided that show the proportion of a country's population using improved and unimproved access to water, sanitation and hygiene. For the water dataset, IFs draws primarily on...... For the sanitation dataset, IFs uses the sanitation estimates to break the data down into the proportion of population (%) and the amount of people within a population. To construct these data series, IFs draws primarily on the population served with improved sanitation, unimproved sanitation, other unimproved sanitation, shared sanitation, and open defication sanitation.

The most recent update was in Sept. 2024. There are 8 preprocessors and 100 non-preprocessors.

Instructions on Downloading data

1. Go to https://washdata.org/data/downloads#WLD
2. Click "World file" under "Household" to download all the data.
   
3. Open the downloaded file. "Enable Editing". Hover the mouse to the tab and right-click. The file will show several options:
   
4. Click "Unhide", and a view will pop up.
   
5. Press "ctrl" and select "wat" and "san". Click "OK".
6. In these 2 tabs, you may find the columns we will use in "Code in Source" listed below.

Instructions on Importing Water Data into IFs

This section explains the methodology to be followed when importing WSS JMP water supply data into IFs. It also describes certain problems that a user might face in interpreting and understanding the data.

Source: Water supply data is published by the WHO/UNICEF JMP. The data is available at the website https://washdata.org/data/downloads#WLD

Country List to be Used: WSS JMP

Ladder and Related code in downloaded data:

IFs include both old and new water systems from WSS JMP. The new system is developed based on the old system, thus, you can find some overlapping variable labels between two systems. Below we listed a mapping between the ladders used in IFs and those being used in WSS JMP.

New system-

TAB	Ladder in IFs	WSS JMP Variable
wat	SafelyManaged	sm
wat	AtLeastBasic	basal
wat	Basic	basal - sm
wat	Limited	lim
wat	Unimproved	unimp
wat	Surface	ns

In which, SafelyManaged is the intersaction of following 3 categories (most of time the result is just the minimal among three)

• SMOnPremise = imp_prem; used to be premises
• SMAsNeeded = imp_av; used to be available
• SMNotContam = imp_qual; used to be quality

You can also observe that unimp + imp + ns = 100%, where imp = basal + lim = pip + imp_npip

Old system-

TAB	Ladder in IFs	WSS JMP Variable
wat	OtherImproved	imp_npip
wat	Piped	pip
wat	OtherUnimproved	unimp
wat	Surface	ns

Notes:

• All indicators use suffices to indicate regional levels, with
  • _t means national indicators (Total%); used to be _n being national
  • _r means Rural%
  • _u means Urban%
• Prefix pop_ means Population in Thousands
• prop_u is the percentage of urban population in total population.
• 100 - prop_u is the percentage of rural population in total population.
• The rest of data are in percentages

Thus, under the raw data (the Excel file downloaded following the instruction above), the TAB column in the mapping above represents the name of the spreadsheet, while the other two columns represent the one-to-one mapping between IFs data table name and WSS JMP variable name. For example, table SeriesWSSJMPWaterTotal%SafelyManaged from IFsHistSeries equals to the variable wat_sm_t. Same rules apply to the sanitation data introduced below.

Instructions on Importing Sanitation Data into IFs

This section explains the methodology to be followed when importing WSS JMP sanitation data into IFs. It also describes certain problems that a user might face in interpreting and understanding the data.

Source: Sanitation data is published by the WHO/UNICEF JMP. The data is available at the website https://washdata.org/data/household#!/table?geo0=region&geo1=sdg.

Country List to be Used: WSS JMP

Ladder and Related code in downloaded data:

IFs include both old and new sanitation systems from WSS JMP. The new system is developed based on the old system, thus, you can find some overlapping variable labels between two systems. Below we listed a mapping between the ladders used in IFs and those being used in WSS JMP.

New system-

TAB	Ladder in IFs	WSS JMP Variable
san	AtLeastBasic	basal
san	Basic	basal - sm
san	Limited	lim
san	OpenDefecation	ns
san	OtherUnimproved	unimp

In which, SafelyManaged is the union of following 3 categories (normally adding three together)

• SMDisposedInsitu = sdo_sm; Disposed in situ
• SMEmpTreated = fst_sm; Emptied and treated
• SMWastewaterTreated = sew_sm; Wastewater treated

You can also find that imp + unimp + ns = 100, where imp = basal + lim; Additionally, Improved (imp) is the union of following 3 categories (normally adding three together, if all 3 exist)

• Latrines and other = othimp; used to be lat
• Septic tanks = sep
• Sewer connections = sew

Old system-

TAB	Ladder in IFs	WSS JMP Variable
san	Improved	basal
san	Shared	lim
san	OtherUnimproved	unimp
san	OpenDefecation	ns

Hence, the table SeriesWSSJMPSanitationTotal%SafelyManaged from IFsHistSeries is the equivalent to the variable san_sm_t from WSS JMP.