Making WASH monitoring and evaluation work for everyone: the experience of the DRC WASH consortium

The DRC WASH Consortium, comprised of five international NGOs led by Concern Worldwide, has been active in DRC since 2013 with a rural WASH programme reaching nearly 750,000 people. One of the Consortium’s key goals is complementarity with DRC’s national rural WASH programme, therefore harmonising the Consortium’s monitoring & evaluation framework with the national programme’s standards has been a strategic requirement. In addition, the Consortium needs to comply with its donor’s global WASH indicators (UKaid) and to measure the success of its own programme approach according to key indicators. The process of defining those multiple sets of requirements and of integrating them in a consistent whole has resulted in a multidimensional monitoring & evaluation framework. This paper describes this process and highlights the challenges and potential of monitoring WASH in similar contexts.