Template for assessing the governance of public water supply and sanitation service providers

This note proposes a template for assessing the governance of urban water supply and sanitation (WSS) service providers and its impact of the quality of service and performance of operations. The template can be used for decentralized autonomous public corporations responsible for providing the WSS service to customers as well as other institutional arrangements ranging from government departments to autonomous public WSS asset holding companies subcontracting operations to professional operators. This template complements the extensive work done on performance indicators through the International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities (IBNET). IBNET has developed a series of indicators to help carry out a complete physical check-up of an urban WSS sector or an urban WSS service provider. Annex gives the complete list of IBNET metric indicators aimed at measuring service coverage, sustainability, and affordability. When reliable data are generated, the indicators give an excellent snapshot of the quality of the WSS service and of the performance of WSS service providers and picture of their evolution over time. In many cases however, it is difficult or even impossible to find reliable data on basic parameters. Designing and implementing a program aimed at generating reliable data is often one of the first gaps to be addressed to help define and monitor the progress of performance improvement programs. The performance of a WSS service provider is obviously influenced