Athena Infonomics rolls out three-year WASH program in Africa & Asia

The system will be designed in such a way that it brings relevant stakeholders together and creates a template for convergence on the Sustainable Development Goals on global partnerships and coordination.

Athena Infonomics, a data-driven global consultancy, recently announced the launch of its first city in Bill and Melinda Gates-funded 3 year WASH program. The intensive program spans 8 pilot cities across Africa and Asia, seeking to revolutionize urban liquid waste management with a special focus on Fecal Sludge Management (FSM).

The program is unique in the way that it seeks to improve existing waste management systems by developing and implementing a strong and user-friendly Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation (MLE) system. 

The program will support the development of a standard monitoring and benchmarking protocol to evaluate the performance of the program cities in FSM and help the cities in the areas of intervention design, effectiveness tracking, rapid cycle evaluation, and course correction, identification of replicable and transplantable ideas, and of course, overall assessment of impact.

It will also create an effective knowledge management and peer learning system, with a user-friendly ‘search interface’ that will enable practitioners in the FSM ecosystem to better access and learn from existing sources of evidence. The system will be designed in such a way that it will bring relevant stakeholders together and create a template for convergence on the Sustainable Development Goals on global partnerships and coordination.

“We are thrilled to be implementing such a landmark program where 8 pilot cities represent a diverse range of FSM activities and ecosystem maturity”, said Deepa Karthykeyan, Athena InfonomicsCo-founder and Director.

“This program is especially exhilarating as its potential influence extends far beyond the 8 cities in the current portfolio. It will serve as a blueprint for other cities to implement such MLE mechanisms in FSM," she added.

Founded in 2010, Athena Infonomics supports global and local actors, both public and private, by designing data-backed policies and programs. It has offices that span from Washington D.C. to South Asia and has served over 60 clients across 20 sectors and 5 continents since it was founded in 2010. Its clients have included the World Bank, DFID, UNDP, UNICEF, and WSUP (Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor), to name a few.