Operational monitoring plan development: A guide to strengthening operational monitoring practices in small-to medium- sized water supplies

The WHO/AusAID (‎DFAT)‎ Partnership for Water Quality and Health has been promoting water safety plans (‎WSPs)‎ in countries of the South-East Asia Region for more a decade. WSPs are designed to benefit all water users by ensuring improved water quality throughout a supply system and are seen as a way of improving health and enhancing system sustainability. One of the biggest challenges for sustainable implementation of WSPs, especially for smaller systems, is good operational monitoring to ensure that control measures to improve water quality are still working. WHO contracted an operational water quality expert to help Bhutan and Timor-Leste to improve their operational monitoring through the delivery of a tailored training programme and the implementation of standard operating procedures for using water quality monitoring instrumentation. These simple, clear and comprehensive SOPs are now published in response to a growing demand for supporting training materials and manuals for this technical area.