Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. This is an extract from Finextra's The Future of ESGTech 2022 report.

Focus Target 6.a: By 2030, expand international cooperation and capacity-building support to developing countries in water- and sanitation-related activities and programmes, including water harvesting, desalination, water efficiency, wastewater treatment, recycling and reuse technologies.

While alternative data can help to bridge gaps in our knowledge, it must be understood that public data is still not being leveraged to its full potential. According to the World Bank Group, public intent data holds “great potential for designing, executing, and evaluating public programs and policy.” Further, because public intent data is “a prerequisite for many government functions, government agencies are the primary producers of these data by means of censuses, administrative data collection, and more.”

Nigeria’s use of public intent data to ensure sustainable management of water and sanitation is a successful example. The National Water Supply and Sanitation Survey commissioned by Nigeria’s government in 2015 gathered data from several sources including households, water points, water schemes, and public facilities, such as schools and health facilities. This data found that 130 million Nigerians - more than two-thirds of the population at that time - did not meet the standard for sanitation according to the clean water requirement set out by the SDGs.

The report highlighted that the “higher the quality of the data (in terms of features such as timeliness, accuracy, and resolution), the greater is their potential to generate value for development. Yet a variety of factors prevent countries – particularly low-income ones – from realizing greater value from data for the public good. These impediments include lack of resources, technical capacity, data governance, and demand for data-informed decision-making.” What is the solution here?

As with many of these Goals, transparency – particularly of a country’s debt burden – can be the catalyst for driving long-term, stable financing of data as well as investment in statistical capacity to derive actionable insights. Effective use of data generates more demand for data, justifying investments to produce higher-quality data, and it is this higher-quality data that is often an obstacle to accessing clean drinking water. However, this form of education can drive financial inclusion.

“Households typically can, and should, cover the costs of accessing water resources, but they cannot do this without help. Financial inclusion can help households access water resources. Financial inclusion focuses on ensuring everyone has access to useful and affordable financial products and services, including transactions, payments, savings, credit and insurance,” according to the World Bank Group.

ACTION FOR 2022: Gather higher quality data to generate value for development of clean drinking water and sanitation facilities.