Method used by the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) to assess coverage rates in water supply and sanitation
The assessment questionnaire, used by the Joint Monitoring Programme to assess the coverage rate for WSS in the various developing countries, defined access to water supply and sanitation in terms of the types of technology and levels of service provided. Accepted water and sanitation services had to be on the list of "improved technologies".
For water supply and sanitation services:
“Improved water supply sources” included house connections, public standpipes, boreholes (at least with with handpumps), protected dug wells, protected springs and rainwater collection; allowance was also made for other locally-defined technologies.
“Access to water” was broadly defined as the availability of at least 20 litres per person per day from a source within one kilometre of the user’s dwelling. Types of source that did not give reasonable and ready access to water for domestic hygiene purposes, such as tanker trucks and bottled water, were not included (bottled water was not considered “improved” because of concerns about the quantity of supplied water, not the water's quality).
“Improved sanitation facilities” was defined as including connection to a sewer or septic tank system, pour-flush latrine, simple (or double) pit or ventilated, improved pit latrine, again allowing for acceptable local technologies. The excreta disposal system was considered adequate if it was private or shared (but not public) and if it hygienically separated human excreta from human contact.
“Access to water and sanitation” does not imply that the level of service or quality of water is “adequate” or “safe”, as the assessment questionnaire did not include any methodology for discounting coverage figures to allow for intermittence or poor quality of the water supplies. However, the instructions stated that piped systems should not be considered “functioning” unless they were operating at over 50% capacity on a daily basis and that handpumps should not be considered “functioning” unless they were operating for at least 70% of the time with a maximum of two weeks' delay between breakdown and repair. These aspects were taken into consideration for the few countries for which national surveys had not been previously conducted. However, the JMP statistics are primarily based on existing survey data which ignores these aspects.
For rural and urban areas:
The Assessment 2000 did not provide a standard definition of urban or rural areas. Instead, the questionnaire asked for the countries’ own working definitions of 'urban' and 'rural'. Similarly, with the household survey data, definitions set by those responsible for the survey were accepted.
Source: Joint Monitoring Programme, "Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report"
Asia Water Watch 2015: Are Countries in Asia on Track to Meet Target 10 of the Millennium Development Goals? Asian Development Bank, 2005