WASH accounts

Adequate funding and effective financing for WASH are essential to deliver and sustain services, and to allow countries to make progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 and other SDG targets. To identify and track financial flows in the WASH sector, WHO developed the TrackFin methodology. The TrackFin methodology supports the collection and mapping for WASH financial flows, in a comprehensive and comparable manner, based on standard TrackFin classifications. TrackFin produces WASH accounts which can be used for national benchmarking, cross-country comparisons and to provide an evidence base to better plan, finance, manage and monitor WASH services and systems.

TrackFin and WASH accounts aim to answer four key questions:

1. What is the total expenditure in the WASH sector?
2. What are WASH funds being spent on?
3. Who pays for WASH services and how much do they pay?
4. Who are the main WASH service providers and how much are they spending?

TrackFin has been initiated in over 20 countries with the support of a number of development partners, and countries around the world continue to show interest. 

Building on the experience of the national health accounts, which have been used in the health sector for several decades, WHO has developed a methodology to track financing to WASH, based on a previous working paper released in 2012. This has been done jointly with leading institutions and experts (such as UN Department of Statistics, the OECD and the World Bank).

This methodology enables countries to track funding and financing to the sector based on standard classifications and development a set of WASH accounts and indicators presented in a comparable format.