The Gwatkin Equity Prize: Bringing the EquityTool for all Solstice users

mWater was recently awarded the Davidson Gwatkin Equity Measurement Prize for work on the Monitoring System for the  UNICEF / LIXIL Partnership in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. The partnership supports access to better sanitation for the households with the lowest income by strengthening sanitation markets to meet the demand created by UNICEF’s efforts to stop the practice of open defecation combined with LIXIL’s SATO products, which provide safe, affordable and sustainable solutions for communities to improve and sustain proper sanitation. We’re grateful for this accolade, and are proud to be part of this ongoing work on equitable sanitation markets. You can learn more about this project here.

A key component of the monitoring system is to help reach the poorest households, and to help shape the sanitation market in the target countries so that better sanitation can be equitably reached. Using the EquityTool, the project evaluation team was able to determine household wealth quintiles, in real time, for project beneficiaries, and inform program management as to whether they were reaching their target demographics.

In this post we’ll look at the EquityTool indicators which have been added to mWater as part of this work, and how any user of the platform can make use of them in surveys to quickly and easily assess which wealth quintile a household is part of.

EquityTool

The EquityTool is a simple set of approximately 12 country-specific questions that can be added to household surveys to estimate the relative wealth or poverty of the household, using standardized wealth quintiles. It has been collaboratively built from the full wealth index found in the Demographic and Health Surveys, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, AIDS Indicator Surveys, or other nationally representative sources.

The questions are calibrated to each country and touch on easily verifiable dimensions such as whether the household has electricity, a TV, or a table; and what materials the walls and roof of the dwelling are made of. Completing all the questions yields a score which then places the household in the appropriate wealth quintile. You can learn much more about the methodology from the EquityTool website.

Any Solstice user could manually setup EquityTool-style calculations in their surveys with some effort, but thanks to the UNICEF / LIXIL work we’ve been able to build them as indicators for a number countries which allow you to very easily bring the set of questions into your own surveys.

Adding the EquityTool to any of your own surveys

Solstice has a powerful indicator library stocked with expert-defined indicators for standardized data collection, which you can bring into your own surveys with a click of a button.

We’ve added a number of EquityTool countries to an indicator set, and more will be added.

There are two ways to bring an EquityTool indicator into a survey you are designing. Either by starting a new survey directly from the indicator page, or bringing in the indicator questions into an existing survey in the Survey Design view. Let’s look at the steps to do this in detail:

1) Indicator Library

2) Add to existing Survey

If you are already working on a survey, the best way to add an EquityTool indicator is to go to your survey, and:

  • Open the Indicator Library pane from the right side of your survey design tab.

  • Search for the relevant EquityTool indicator, specific to your country context.

  • Click Add Indicator.

The EquityTool questions will now be added to your survey, and the system will intelligently attempt to match any questions with ones that are the same and already in your survey, such as the GPS location of the household. You can choose whether the Indicator will be Open (anyone can see the result, but not the underlying data or your survey), or Closed (only survey deployment viewers can see the result of the indicator).

Whether you start a new survey from the indicator library, or add an EquityTool set to your existing form, you’ll now have all the relevant EquityTool questions in your survey and you can start collecting data for them. The quintile a household belongs to will be calculated as soon as your survey response has synced with the server. That data will then be available to you in real-time for any analyses and visualizations you build in Solstice, or export from the system.

Learn more about indicators and survey design in our Resource Center.

Learn more about building visualizations with any data in Solstice.

If you want to see more EquityTool indicators in Solstice, please contact info@solstice.world

Petri mWater