The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), announced in September 2015, present a vision of achieving a higher level of human health and well-being worldwide by the year 2030. The SDG targets specific to water and sanitation call for more detailed monitoring and response to understand the coverage and quality of safely managed sources. It is hoped that improved monitoring of water and sanitation interventions will reveal more cost-effective and efficient ways of meeting the SDGs. In this paper, we review the landscape of approaches that can be used to support and improve on the water and sanitation targets SDG 6.1, “By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all”, and SDG 6.2, “By 2030, achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations”.

Access to safe water has tremendous direct and indirect impacts on poverty-related outcomes. In Mexico, economies of scale in water provision justify bulk provision of water, such that it is collectively rational to invest heavily in capital for infrastructure development. This is compounded by the fact that water utilities are highly capital-intensive. We analyze two distinct types of subsidies prevalent in the residential water sector. We exploit a household socio-economic module with detailed water services information from the 2014 National Income and Expenditure Survey in Mexico. We combined this data with a unique dataset from water operators in Mexico (PIGOO). We estimate economic (considering operating costs) and direct (considering household’s water payments) subsidies targeted to residential water tariff subsidies. Large heterogeneity in the direct subsidy incidence is found, which partly explains the distortions and wide differences in tariffs and total amount paid for water among different segments of the income distribution. The Omega Indicators (Ω), defined as the proportion of the subsidies received by the poor divided by the proportion of households in the total population in poverty, is less than one, implying that wealthy populations benefit more from water subsidies (economic and direct) than the poor.

The sustainability of rural water supply services (WSS) remains one of the core challenges of the rural water sector in Nicaragua. The data available through the Central American Rural Water and Sanitation Information System in Nicaragua (SIASAR, in Spanish) is utilized to investigate the factors that drive the sustained functionality and quality of rural WSS systems over time. This report uses data from 6,863 communities, 4,792 water systems, 2,585 service providers, and 154 technical assistance (TA) providers contained in the SIASAR dataset. Statistical and econometric analysis provide evidence to support the hypothesis – widespread among rural WSS practitioners – that ‘soft’ measures in the provision of WSS are effective in fostering sustainability or ‘functionality’ of those systems. Such ‘soft’ measures include management capacity building of WSS community boards in charge of WSS oversight; demand-responsive approaches for developing, operating, managing, maintaining, rural water infrastructure; cost...