Gather's Benchmark Project

Over two billion people do not have access to safely managed sanitation. In the face of this global sanitation crisis, we believe that national decision makers and their sanitation partners need better access to quality data so that they improve sanitation infrastructure and services for vulnerable communities. However, the majority of sanitation datasets are siloed, incomplete or incompatible with other datasets. This creates both a practical and ethical problem. Datasets sit unused. The low quality of the datasets mean that they cannot be relied on to create insightful baselines or maps. As a result, the data does not lead to the change that it was collected for.

The sanitation sector needs to collect and share better data. To do this, we need to have an open conversation about what data we are collecting, and how and why we are collecting the data. To aide this conversation we have built this tool:

• Assessed the availability, accessibility and accuracy of sanitation data for fifty countries and three cities;
• Recommended principles for organisations to adopt to help improve the integrity of sanitation data;
• Invited organisations to contribute data to improve the benchmark for each country and city.

Take a look and let us know if you would like to get involved!