Measuring Sanitation Poverty: A Multidimensional Measure to Assess Delivery of Sanitation and Hygiene Services at the Household Level

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) are at the core of sustainable development. As we embark on a new round of global goals, namely the Sustainable Development Goals, a top priority is to address a coherent framework for monitoring these services. In the coming years, the sector will witness the development of a variety of multidimensional monitoring measures, albeit from different perspectives. This paper reviews the relevant literature and discusses the adequacy and applicability of one approach that is increasingly adopted for multidimensional poverty measurement at the household level, the Alkire-Foster methodol­ogy. Drawing on this method, we identify and combine a set of direct household-related water and sanitation deprivations that batter a person at the same time. This new multidimensional measure is useful for gaining a better understanding of the context in which WaSH services are delivered. It captures both the incidence and intensity of WaSH poverty, and provides a new tool to support monitoring and reporting. For illustrative purposes, one small town in Mozambique is selected as the initial case study. 

Citation: Giné-Garriga, R. and Pérez-Foguet, A. (2018). ‘Measuring sanitation poverty: a multidimen­sional measure to assess delivery of sanitation and hygiene services at the household level’. OPHI Working Paper 116, University of Oxford.

Also published online in Natural Resources Forum, A United Nations Sustainable Development Journal, 2019, Vol. 43(2), pp. 82–94.