Effective financing for drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) is essential to deliver and sustain services. The UN-Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS) results indicate that there are substantial gaps in our understanding and tracking of financing to the WASH sector. Financial reporting is often insufficient to make sound and evidence-based planning and budgeting decisions. To respond to these needs, WHO launched the TrackFin initiative as part of GLAAS in September 2012.
TrackFin (Tracking Financing to WASH) is a methodology to identify and track financing to the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector at the national or sub-national level in a consistent and comparable manner. TrackFin produces WASH accounts which can be used for national benchmarking, cross-country comparisons and to provide an evidence base to better plan, finance, manage and monitor WASH services and systems.
TrackFin tracks financing expenditures in the WASH sector to answer four main questions:
- What is the total expenditure in the WASH sector?
- How are funds distributed between different WASH services and types of expenditure?
- Who pays for WASH services and how much do they pay?
- Which entities are the main funding channels for the WASH sector?
TrackFin has been initiated in over 15 countries with the support of a number of development partners, and countries around the world continue to show interest. As more countries and development partners continue to show interest in and implement TrackFin, the evidence base for WASH financing decisions will continue to grow.
This guidance document sets out a methodology to identify and track financing to the WASH sector in a coherent and consistent manner across several countries. It is designed to help countries track financing to the WASH sector on a regular and comparable basis and analyse this information to support evidence-based policy-making based on useful indicators.
