The Department for International Development (DfID) must focus less on “outputs” and more on long-term change if its efforts to improve access to water are to be maintained, the UK’s aid watchdog has said.
In the last parliament, the government pledged to use UK aid to provide 60m people with access to clean water, better sanitation or interventions to promote hygiene — collectively known as “WASH” support — between 2011 and 2015.
A new report by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) — set up in 2011 to measure the effectivess of the UK’s overseas development spending — finds that the department’s claims to have exceeded that target by 2.9m were reached using “appropriate methods and conservative assumptions”.
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And it says that DfID has made “a substantial contribution to improving WASH access for poor and vulnerable communities in priority countries”, awarding the department its second highest “Green/Amber” rating.
But the aid watchdog sounds a note of caution on the long-term sustainability of DfID’s interventions, saying that the focus on how many people have been reached by the interventions “says nothing” about their “impact on people’s lives”.
While ICAI says it has “some evidence of impact from individual programme evaluations — including improved health outcomes and increased school attendance — the watchdgo says DfID must do more to collect impact data which is “not being routinely collected”.
“While such results may be occurring across the portfolio, we cannot reach conclusions as to where and to what extent. This in turn makes it difficult to conclude that DfID is doing all it can to maximise impact.”
ICAI acknowledges that sustained change is “a particular challenge” in WASH programmes, and says interventions to improve access to water and hygine require “intensive engagement with beneficiary communities over an extended period”.
But it says DfID “does not approach the sustainability challenge in a systematic way” — and may be too short-term in its focus.
“While many of its programmes include investments in building national systems, this is not being done consistently,” the watchdog says.
“The typical three to five years’ duration of DFID’s WASH programmes is often too short to put in place the conditions for sustainable impact.
It adds: “Furthermore, DFID does not monitor whether results are sustained beyond the life of its programmes. This is an area where DFID has fallen behind some other donors in the WASH sector. For example, the Dutch Development Agency and USAID now use sustainability checks for up to ten years after programme completion.”
ICAI concludes that DfID’s systems are “designed to maximise outputs, rather than sustainable impact”, a situation it says has “changed little” since a 2003 National Audit Office report raised similar concerns.
DfID has now set itself the challenge of increasing access to wASH programmes by a further 60m people during the current parliament. As it goes about achieving that goal, ICAI urges the department to “embed sustainability” in its approach, and says DfID should consider making longer-term interventions and tracking the impact of programmes after funding has ended.
Launching the report, ICAI’s lead commissioner on the study, Richard Gledhill said: “Reaching 62.9m people with water, sanitation and hygiene improvements is an impressive result, and one which UK aid can be proud of.
“But it is concerning that DfID does not monitor whether these results are sustained beyond the lifetime of a project, with its systems designed to maximise outputs rather than create lasting change.”
He added: “DfID also needs to improve how it monitors value for money and the impact of its programmes. And although it is already working in the poorest and hardest-to-reach communities, the new commitment to ‘leave no one behind’ in the Global Goals means it will also need to target women and girls, the elderly, and people with disabilities within these communities.”
According to ICAI, annual UK aid spending on water and sanitation programmes has increased sevenfold in the last twelve years, and currently stands at nearly £200m.