The WASH Insecurity Analysis (WIA) is a structured analytical framework that helps identify which areas within a country face the highest levels of water, sanitation, and hygiene insecurity. By combining service levels, hazard exposure, hazard impact, and vulnerability data into a relative WASH insecurity score, the WIA has enabled more targeted resource allocation and evidence-based decision-making across 11 countries, reaching 34.6 million people in need.
The Global Challenge
2.1 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 3.4 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and 1.7 billion lack basic hygiene services. In fragile and crisis-affected settings, the challenge is even greater, where children under 5 are 20 times more likely to die from water-related diseases. Climate change, protracted conflicts, and displacement are putting increasing pressure on already stretched systems.
While the WASH sector has made progress in collecting data, through household surveys, geospatial tools, and multi-sector assessments, turning that data into clear, comparable, and actionable insights has been a persistent gap. Unlike food security or nutrition, which benefit from sector-wide tools such as the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC), WASH has not had a common analytical framework to guide collective prioritisation and decision-making.
A partner in the Democratic Republic of the Congo emphasized the need: “I would like to have a (cluster-specific) tool that provides all the details and helps us analyze WASH needs – for example, on water access and quality, or specific sanitation needs. Such details are missing.”
The Solution: WASH Insecurity Analysis (WIA)
The WASH Insecurity Analysis (WIA) was developed to fill this gap. It provides a structured way to identify which areas within a country face the highest levels of WASH insecurity. By combining information on WASH service levels, hazard exposure, hazard impact and vulnerability, the WIA supports governments, humanitarian actors, and development partners to:
- Evidence-based prioritization of geographic areas within a country
- Prioritize investments with evidence-based targeting
- Improve coordination across humanitarian and development actors
- Enable multi-sector action in hotspots where famine risk is accelerating
- Advocate for WASH funding with comparable, credible data
- Support anticipatory action for crisis preparedness
The methodology is designed to be practical, scalable, and rooted in the human right to water and sanitation.
How It Works
At its core, the WIA is a composite index built from 26 indicators grouped into four dimensions:
- WASH service levels – Access to water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities
- Current hazard impacts – Ongoing shocks affecting WASH systems
- Future hazard exposure – Climate and disaster risk projections
- WASH-related vulnerabilities – Underlying factors that amplify risk
Each indicator is scored using country-defined thresholds, and the results are aggregated into a single WASH Insecurity Score. The score enables comparisons between sub-national areas within a country, highlighting where needs are most severe.
The approach is flexible. Countries can integrate modular analyses (e.g., gender-based violence risks, displacement) or tailored analyses for specific crises. Because it relies mainly on secondary data such as DHS, MICS, and multi-sector needs assessments, the method is cost-effective and adaptable to varying data environments.
Behind the WIA methodology sits a significant data engineering and analytics innovation. The framework required wrangling multi-source datasets across surveys, administrative systems, geospatial hazard layers, and vulnerability indicators into a standardized, reproducible scoring pipeline. Through collaboration with UNICEF’s Data and Analytics Section and the Frontier Data and Technology Unit, indicator processing and composite score generation were automated using modular analytics scripts and geospatial workflows. This reduced manual processing, improved comparability across countries, and enabled rapid iteration as new data became available. By integrating fragmented datasets into a standardized analytical pipeline, the WIA moves the WASH sector closer to a shared architecture for evidence generation.
Impact on the Ground
Since 2022, the WIA has been piloted in countries including Kenya, Mali, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Honduras, El Salvador, and Togo. These pilots show how the tool can:
- Identify underserved regions with precision
- Guide pooled funding allocations for maximum impact
- Strengthen humanitarian response plans with evidence
Real-World Results
In South Sudan, the WIA provided a county-level (Admin 2) overview of relative WASH insecurity, highlighting sharp sub-national disparities in a context affected by conflict, large-scale displacement, recurrent flooding, and chronic underfunding.
The analysis identified Uror, Koch, Ayod, Fangak, and Aweil North among the most WASH-insecure counties, with nearly 1.6 million people living in the 10 most WASH-insecure counties. By clarifying where severe service gaps, hazard exposure, and underlying vulnerabilities converge, the WIA strengthened collective prioritisation and advocacy in one of the most underfunded WASH responses globally.
Through collective needs analysis and prioritisation within the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP), the WASH sector was better positioned to attract and align approximately USD 21.8 million in funding for South Sudan in 2025.
“This analysis is highly needed and allows us to work from a collective evidence base for all partners, observed a donor representative in the Humanitarian Country Team in South Sudan. “It has already influenced, and will continue to influence, the way we work as a sector. WASH has long lacked such a collective tool, and it also strengthens our ability to advocate together for better data quality and stronger local ownership of this data.”
In Mali, the WIA provided a cercle-level (Admin 2) overview of relative WASH insecurity, revealing pronounced sub-national disparities in a context shaped by conflict, displacement, climate shocks, and chronic underfunding.
The analysis identified Ansongo, Ménaka, and Gao among the most WASH-insecure cercles, with nearly 1.2 million people living in the 10 most WASH-insecure cercles. By clarifying where service gaps, hazards, and vulnerabilities converge, the WIA strengthened collective prioritisation and advocacy, while also helping bridge humanitarian response planning with longer-term development and systems-strengthening discussions in a severely underfunded context.
The analysis identified 10 counties with critical WASH gaps, representing 21.2 million people. Through collective needs analysis and prioritisation within the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP), the WASH sector was better positioned to conduct more granular gap analysis, support corrective measures by partners, and facilitate the reallocation of emergency funds, helping to attract and align approximately USD 11.5 million in WASH funding in 2025.
Across all pilot countries, WIA analysis has informed the allocation of resources associated with $137 million in humanitarian funding and identified priority areas serving 34.6 million people.
Reflecting its growing relevance, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) has endorsed the WIA as a standardized tool for sector-wide analysis.
Implementation Challenges and Lessons Learned
Implementation of the WIA has highlighted several recurring challenges:
- Data availability and quality: Gaps in sub-national data can limit indicator coverage in some contexts.
- Capacity and ownership: Effective use requires early engagement and capacity strengthening of national stakeholders.
- Coordination and validation: Ensuring collective buy-in takes time and clear validation processes.
These challenges have been addressed through close collaboration with WASH clusters and line ministries, transparent documentation of assumptions and thresholds, and iterative refinement of the methodology.
Aliocha Salagnac, WIA Senior Knowledge Management and Analysis Specialist, believes that major lesson from the pilots was that strong global data preparation drives national uptake: “By front-loading global datasets and secondary analysis, partners were able to focus on expert judgment, resolve data quality issues, and agree collectively on the framework, enabling early buy-in from UNICEF and line ministries and embedding the WIA into humanitarian and development fora,” Salagnac observes.
Key learnings from the pilot phase also include:
- Partnerships are critical: National WASH clusters, governments, and local actors must be involved from the outset.
- Modularity enables relevance: The flexible design ensures adaptation to each country’s needs and available data.
- Iterative improvement: Continuous feedback from users guides methodology refinements and training materials.
Each WIA snapshot includes a dedicated full page outlining the methodology, thresholds, and limitations, strengthening transparency and supporting more responsible and effective data-informed advocacy.
Why It Matters for the Sector
“The WIA has become a coordination asset, not just an analytical product,” says Monica Ramos, Global WASH Cluster Coordinator at UNICEF. “It enables humanitarian, development, local and national actors to come together around a common analytical framework that drives a shared understanding of WASH insecurity and its underlying vulnerabilities, making coordination more strategic and more forward-looking.”
By offering a common analytical method, the WIA addresses a long-standing challenge for the WASH sector. It enables:
- Comparable, country-led assessments of WASH insecurity across different contexts
- More equitable and transparent resource allocation based on evidence rather than assumptions
- Stronger advocacy for WASH as a life-saving priority in humanitarian responses
- Enhanced coordination between humanitarian and development actors
This positions WIA as a valuable step toward the kind of shared accountability and evidence base that has helped transform other humanitarian sectors.
“What makes WIA powerful is not only the framework, but the data architecture behind it,” adds Yves Jaques, Chief of UNICEF’s Frontier Data and Technology Unit. “By engineering a reproducible, country-adaptable analytics pipeline that integrates survey, hazard, and vulnerability data, we have helped transform scattered datasets into a scalable decision-support system for the WASH sector.”
What’s Next
With support from the European Union Humanitarian Aid and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the WIA is now scaling up. The goal is to reach 25 countries by the end of 2026.
Expansion Roadmap
- Training national stakeholders and embedding WIA into coordination processes
- Developing new thematic modules (e.g., WASH in health facilities, gender-based violence)
- Integrating WIA into anticipatory action frameworks for crisis preparedness
- Expanding partnerships with institutions in the Global South
“Our long-term vision for the WIA is to make it a shared public good for the sector: a common, trusted evidence base that countries can use to prioritise action, strengthen coordination, and link humanitarian response with longer-term systems strengthening,” says James Brown, WIA Coordinator. “By grounding decisions in collective analysis, WIA helps ensure that the people facing the highest WASH insecurity are no longer invisible in planning, funding, or policy discussions.”
The WIA provides the humanitarian community with a way to understand where and why WASH needs are greatest within a country. By transforming fragmented data into a shared, actionable evidence base, the WIA is helping partners work better together to prioritise action, strengthen advocacy, and uphold the human right to water and sanitation.
Acknowledgements
The WIA is a collective sector effort led by UNICEF and the Global WASH Cluster, developed and implemented in close collaboration with national WASH clusters/sectors, partners, governments, and local actors. Their engagement and validation have been essential to ensuring country ownership, relevance, and practical uptake.
The analysis is underpinned by strong collaboration with global data and technical partners, including UNICEF’s Data and Analytics Section, Office of Strategy and Evidence through the WASH and Frontier Data and Technology Unit, and the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP). Access additional information from the UNICEF Data Warehouse and WASH Knowledge Hub.
Project Team includes Monica Ramos (Global WASH Cluster Coordinator), James Brown (WASH Insecurity Analysis Coordinator), José Espinoza (Data Analyst Consultant), Alberto Sibileau (Data Engineering Consultant), Aliocha Salagnac (Senior Knowledge and Analysis Specialist), Tom Slaymaker (Senior Adviser Statistics), Omar El Hattab (Senior Adviser WASH), Yves Jaques (Chief Frontier Data Tech Unit).
Development and scale-up of the WIA have been made possible through the generous support of the European Union Humanitarian Aid and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, alongside contributions from partners across the humanitarian and development community.
