The delivery of water and sanitation services together with the
promotion of hygiene is central to public health. In recent years, service
delivery has shifted to decentralised approaches; on the basis
that decentralisation will favour local needs and priorities. Any prospect
to develop more pro-poor policies, though, depends upon real
efforts to strengthen the capacity of decentralised authorities. Integral
to this challenging process, and to enable policymakers to move from
opaque to informed discussions, accurate and reliable data at local
level have to be accessible, i.e. routinely collected and adequately
disseminated. Against this background, the aim of this article is to develop
a cost-effective method for primary data collection which ultimately
produces estimates accurate enough to feed into decision-making
processes.