The Ugandan Water Project and The Water Project share a commitment to transparency within their work and to the strengthening of the entire water sector. These values manifest in their shared sponsorship of Embeddable Dashboards, a new feature of mWater, the cloud-based, open-access data platform both organizations use for tracking the impact of their programs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Embeddable Dashboards allow mWater users to share interactive data directly to a website through easy to deploy embeds that automatically update as data collection occurs in the field. This capability is game-changing, making it easy, fast, and free to bring live data to all stakeholders. James Harrington, UWP’s Executive Director is enthusiastic about the new feature. “This feature opens up tremendous opportunities, but our first priority is to share an interactive map of UWP’s water projects that allows anyone to visit our website and see all of the water projects we’ve implemented and their current functionality – that’s important because although everything was working the day a particular water point was installed, it matters more to know if that water point is working today.” Explore UWP’s map created as an embeddable dashboard here.
The Ugandan Water Project’s partnership with the Ugandan Ministry of Water & Environment and District Water Offices presents another opportunity for deploying Embeddable Dashboards. “This feature will allow us to provide government teams with the ability to see and share progress for key indicators such as water quality and water-point functionality across multiple organizations and contractors operating in their jurisdiction,” said Tanner Hoffman, UWP’s Program Director
The Water Project has been sharing public, near-real-time water point functionality data on its website through bespoke API integration with mWater for many years now. Supporters, partners, and served communities have ready access to their entire water point directory with detailed reporting for each site that includes a mWater-powered historical record of each water point’s monitoring visits and results. “We believe this type of transparency is vital to move both supporters and communities toward an expectation of reliable uptime,” says Spencer Bogle, Program Director at The Water Project. “We also know that our in-country teams take great pride in uptime and collaborate to seek parity in response times and results across their varied regions using this data as a benchmark.”
The Water Project chose to invest in this new mWater feature to lower the technical barriers of transparency for other water organizations. “We believe sharing water point and functionality data, broadly and in near-real-time, moves the sector toward accountability that helps ensure long-term impact,” says Peter Chasse, Founder and President of The Water Project.
The Water Project will soon experiment with additional, live data visualizations on their website to invite supporters and the sector into their mWater monitoring data in even deeper ways. They are eager to see other organizations do the same, sparking collaboration and holding each other accountable for providing access to water that is proven reliable – every day.
Both the Uganda Water Project and The Water Project share the conviction that transparency plays a pivotal role in accomplishing the UN Sustainable Development Goal of providing safe and sustainably managed water for all. Embeddable Dashboards is one more step toward an open and honest display of what works, what doesn’t, how our sector learns from iteration, and what that means for communities in need of lasting, safe water. This feature also empowers and provides greater impact evaluation access for those who fund WaSH and seek to strengthen the flow of funding to organizations that demonstrate the most effective impact. UWP and TWP provide this resource with the hope that it will create and inspire valuable collaboration for the 75,000 mWater users in 180 countries fighting the global water crisis.