Institutional and Cross-Cutting
The collection, analysis and use of water and sanitation data requires technical capacity and monitoring infrastructure as well as institutional capacity and processes and mechanisms for collaborating across sectors and feeding data to policy- and decision-makers.
IMI-SDG6 provides support on institutional capacity building and cross-cutting use of data. You can find an overview of this support in the sidebar to the right.
At the country level, there are often many people working as focal points for various SDG 6 indicators. Therefore, there is a need for an overall focal point for SDG 6 in each country who oversees a coordination mechanism to help integrate analysis and management of the data.
To ensure uptake of the data it is essential to align with national policy- and decision-making processes, and to present the data in an actionable format.
This alignment helps achieve political support which in turn is essential to enable collaboration across sectors and also to secure the needed resources for monitoring.
Available Support to Countries
The UN-Water Technical Advisory Unit coordinates all the available institutional and cross-cutting support. For any inquiries, please contact the helpdesk – details below.D
Guidance on institutional and cross-cutting issues
- UN-Water: Introduction to SDG 6 monitoring and reporting.
- UN-Water: Good practices for country monitoring systems.
- Functions of Overall Focal Points(s) for SDG 6 monitoring.
- Opportunities for citizen science in SDG 6 monitoring and reporting.
- Data collection process and timeline 2022-2024.
- Dedicated page about the 2023 Data Drive.
- Key messages on the value of SDG 6 data.
Support to country focal points
- Helpdesk (email, phone, video conference).
- Newsletters to country focal points (with regular updates about overall and indicator-specific activities).
- Database with country overall and technical focal points (available for country focal points).
- Webinars on various topics (e.g. What progress looks like, Mar 2023, UN 2023 Water Conference and use of national data, Sep 2022, What will you do with water data? Feb 2022, SDG 6 progress webinars, Sep 2021, Global and national synthesis reporting, Dec 2018).
- Global and regional workshops (e.g 1st global workshop in the Hague, Nov 2017, 2nd global workshop online, Dec 2021 and Feb 2022, Africa water and sanitation sector monitoring together with AMCOW, May 2018).
- Kick-off webinar 2023 Data Drive (May 2023, recordings in Arabic, English, French, Russian (audio only) and Spanish, presentation).
Data and progress reporting
- UN-Water: SDG 6 Data Portal (latest country, region and world data on all SDG 6 indicators).
- UN-Water: SDG 6 Synthesis Report 2018.
- UN-Water: SDG 6 Summary Progress Update 2021.
- UN-Water: SDG 6 Progress Reports (all reports on all SDG 6 indicators).
What is the role of the different country focal points?
- Indicator-specific technical focal points periodically receive requests for data from the custodian agencies and are also the primary contacts for capacity-building and other outreach activities. Often, the focal points are working with colleagues within and outside their organization.
- Overall focal points work with indicator-specific focal points and promote coordination and collaboration across the indicators. They are the main point of contact for communications with IMI-SDG6 for all broad issues related to SDG 6 monitoring and the integrated analysis and use of data.