Measuring Sustainability: Mapping Water For People’s Sustainable Services Checklist to the System-Strengthening Building Blocks

In 2015 Water For People began the process of developing the Sustainable Services Checklist (SSC) to assess the broader WASH system in an entire district. The SSC is a tool used with district government partners to assess the strength and sustainability of WASH services in a district. It combines the collective quantitative assessment of service provider performance with a qualitative assessment of the broader system strength at the district level. The SSC was officially launched in 2017 and has since been applied annually in all nine Water For People country programs to evaluate the enabling environment for long-term WASH service provision. While the SSC is contextualized to a specific district’s context, it has eight core indicators that are consistent across three categories.