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Introduction

Water, poverty and environment are intrinsically connected. Areas of high endemism and biodiversity are usually relatively remote and as a result human communities living in close proximity to these areas tend to be impoverished with little to no access to improved water sources and sanitation facilities. Conversely, in the downstream reaches of rivers, acute water shortages are becoming the norm in some areas as the myriad stakeholders take up water to meet their disparate needs e.g. heavy industry, irrigation for agriculture, fisheries, tourism, and municipal water and electricity utilities. The impacts on human health linked to the lack of access to improved water and sanitation facilities range from waterborne diarrheal diseases such as typhoid, giardia and cholera to water-washed diseases such as roundworm, trachoma and scabies. Water and sanitation projects are a fundamental cornerstone of human development. Access to water (in relative proximity) translates into increased economic productivity and healthier communities. Well planned sanitation infrastructure minimizes the risk of acquiring the aforementioned water-borne diseases resulting in a healthier and more vibrant community and healthy ecosystems. Despite these critical links between human health and freshwater ecosystem services, existing institutional and operational barriers limit cooperative efforts to integrate programs for WASH services with those for conservation and environmental protection. During the development of the ABCG Freshwater Conservation and WASH Integration Guidelines, monitoring and evaluation, indicators, and measuring results were themes that came up repeatedly as areas that were lacking research and guidance. Although each sector has existing frameworks for evaluating, for example, the number of people impacted by a WASH project or hectares restored within a watershed, there are no existing resources that evaluate the benefits of an integrated project. USAIDs Global Water Coordinator, Christian Holmes, cited that this gap is one of the major challenges the agency has around the promotion and funding of these types of joint projects. Although it will take time to create a rigorous monitoring and evaluation framework for integrated projects, there is a growing evidence base that can be drawn upon to make a meaningful contribution to the process. This reference document highlights several existing examples of joint indicators and participatory methods designed to capture evidence and information relative to multi-sector efforts. It is no means an exhaustive list, rather it is intended for participants of the July 2014 ABCG workshop to use as a starting point in beginning to identify indicators and methods that could be used to measure progress towards reaching joint conservation and health goals.

Joint Indicators
Collaborative processes add an inherent level of complexity in developing indicators that can capture the added value of integrating projects as opposed to parallel single sector efforts. This section highlights approaches from the Population, Health and the Environment (PHE) community as well as the Department of State and USAID. Population, Health, and the Environment (PHE) PHE projects work to integrate health and/or family planning with conservation activities, thereby seeking synergistic successes and greater conservation and human welfare outcomes than single-sector approaches (Oglethorpe et al., 2008, p. 2). Drawing on decades of initiatives from conservation, community development and health NGOs to deliver programs linking health and conservation, the PHE community developed an overarching framework to assist practitioners in developing an M&E plan. This framework has three components: a menu of population-health-environment indicators judged most useful in monitoring and evaluating PHE programs; indicators of integration; and value-added indicators (Finn, 2007). Integration and value-added indicators are incorporated into the M&E framework to build the evidence base that these programs have more bang for the buck in terms of cost effectiveness and broader, more positive impacts. Integration indicators measure a projects success in implementing cross-sectoral approaches and include indicators for linked messages, collaboration and awareness. According to Finn, an integration indicator highlights the multi-sectoral nature of your program, demonstrating how you work across the PHE sectors, and/or how you combine messages or interventions. Examples include: Instances of organizations facilitating access to services outside of their traditional sectors. Percent of households knowledgeable about or aware of a specific PHE issue. Number and frequency of PHE educational sessions provided in the target community. Value-added indicators are different from integration indicators in that they measure the multidisciplinary nature of PHE approaches by identifying outcomes which go beyond those anticipated if the interventions had been implemented separately. Value-added indicators touch on themes such as gender, governance, economic development and youth. Examples include: Amount of money saved each month (firewood expenditure) among households that install and use an improved cooking stove. Percent of leadership positions held by women on community based natural resource management committees.

Foreign Assistance The Department of State and USAID have developed standard indicators to measure what is being accomplished with foreign assistance, known as the F Indicators, including a suite of cross-cutting indicators that measure performance across multiple program objectives, areas or elements. Specifically, cross-cutting indicators measure performance related to capacity building, gender, multilateral contributions, public/private partnerships, and science, technology and innovation. Examples include: Number of awards made directly to local organizations. Proportion of female participated in USG-assisted programs designed to increase access to productive economic resources (assets, credit, income or employment). Number of tools, technologies, or practices introduced to the commercial sector.

Non-Indicator Based M&E


Non-indicator based M&E complements traditional methods by capturing qualitative, intangible and unexpected changes that are often overlooked with predefined indicators. Additionally, they provide contextual information which helps clarify the causal link between an observed change and project activities. Many of these methods are participatory with project staff and stakeholders contributing to their design and implementation, shifting the focus from accountability to learning. Participatory M&E Participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) is a process through which stakeholders at various levels engage in monitoring or evaluating a particular project, program or policy, share control over the content, the process and the results of the monitoring and evaluation activity and engage in taking or identifying corrective action (World Bank, 2010). It therefore places emphasis not only on what is being measured, but also who is measuring and how different concerns and interests are negotiated and measured. PM&E encompasses a wide range of approaches that include Participatory Rural Appraisal related tools, audio-visual tools, quantitative tools, and tools derived from the anthropological tradition (IFRC, 2007). PM&E has been used by both the WASH and freshwater conservation sectors. For example, participatory hydrological monitoring can improve users understanding of local groundwater resource characteristics and helps local communities in supporting appropriate measures for managing the available resources equitably (APWELL Project, 2003). The table below offers examples of participatory tools used by the WASH sector.

Source: Aubel, 2004 Most Significant Change The Most Significant Change (MSC) method uses storytelling as a means of identifying and assessing the impact of project and program activities from the perspective of stakeholders. MSC is used worldwide by the development community and is gaining prominence in the environment sector -- for example, Fauna & Flora International uses MSC to monitor socioeconomic outcomes and impacts of conservation projects (Wilder and Walpole, 2008). The technique involves the collection of significant change stories emanating from the field, and the systematic selection of the most significant of these stories by panels of designated stakeholders or staff (Davies and Dart, 2005). Once changes have been captured, various people sit down together, read the stories aloud and have regular and often in-depth discussions about the value of these reported changes. Participatory video can help the MSC method go even further by making stories more accessible to all parts of the communities, including the non-literate (Lunch, 2007). This combination has been used successfully in the Mekong Delta, for example, where illiteracy rates are high among rural residents, especially women (Dubois, 2007).

Conclusion
The monitoring and evaluation of WASH and freshwater conservation projects requires an innovative approach that highlights the integrated nature and unique contributions of joint programs over single-sector efforts. In developing an M&E framework practitioners can benefit from the experience gained in the PHE community and others who have produced integrated sets of measures showing the synergistic relationships of multi-sector strategies through integration, value-added and cross-cutting indicators. Additionally, non-indicator based methods such as MSC have been widely adopted by the development and environment sectors to collect evidence of change that is missed by conventional monitoring techniques. By drawing on these lessons learned and contributing to a growing evidence base, the WASH and freshwater conservation sectors can provide the information needed to document and promote successful examples of integrated projects, thereby reducing the barriers to funding and broader implementation.

References
Ayele, Alexon (2013). Measuring Sustainable Development in Ethiopias Guraghe Zone. New Security Beat. APWELL Project (2003). Judicious management of groundwater through participatory hydrological monitoring. A manual. Andhra Pradesh, India: Andhra Pradesh Groundwater Bore well Irrigation Schemes Project (APWELL Project). Aubel, J. (2004). Strategic Report 9, Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation for Hygiene Improvement, Beyond the Toolbox: What else is required for effective PM&E? A Literature Review. Washington DC: Office of Health, Infectious Disease and Nutrition, Bureau for Global Health USAID. Baker, Judy L. (2000). Evaluating the impact of development projects on poverty: a handbook for practitioners, Washington DC: The World Bank. Chambers, R. (2007). Who Counts? The Quiet Revolution of Participation in Numbers, IDS Working Paper No. 296, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton. Davies, R. & Dart, J.J. (2005). The Most Significant Change (MSC) Technique: A Guide to Its Use. Accessed online: http://www.mande.co.uk/docs/MSCGuide.htm Dawkins, Z.J. (2007). The Social Impact of People Oriented Conservation on Cat Ba Island, Vietnam. Working Paper 48, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, Australia National University, Canberra, Australia. Dubios, M. (2007). Using Video to Capture Stories of Change. Internal report, Mekong Wetlands Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Use Programme. Accesssed online at: http://www.mekongwetlands.org/ Finn, T. (2007). A Guide for Monitoring and Evaluating Population-Health-Environment Programs. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) (2007). Monitoring and Evaluation in a Nutshell. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Kleinau, E., and Talbot, J. (2003). When the Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts: Integrated Indicators for Population-Environment Programs. Environmental Change and Security Project, Woodrow Wilson Center. Lunch, C. (2007). The Most Significant Change: using participatory video for monitoring and evaluation. Participatory Learning and Action, 56(1), 28-32. Oglethorpe, J., Honzak, C., & Margoluis, C. (2008). Healthy People, Healthy Ecosystems: A Manual on Integrating Family Planning into Conservation Projects. World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The World Bank (2010). Participatory Monitoring & Evaluation, in Topics: Participation and Civic Engagement. Washington DC: The World Bank. Wilder, L., & Walpole, M. (2008). Measuring social impacts in conservation: experience of using the Most Significant Change method. Oryx, 42(4), 529-538.

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