Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Index: Development and Application to Measure WASH Service Levels in European Humanitarian Camps

In this paper, International Medical Corps highlighted the development and implementation process of a WASH-related composite index. The purpose of the index is to facilitate WASH-related assessments in refugee camps, by capturing and reflecting the actual WASH conditions, and provide the necessary information for efficient program planning and implementation. In the first phase, data was collected from 12 refugee camps in Greece, and 80 sets of synthetic data were created. In the second and final phase, both the data that were gathered and the created data were processed to represent individual indicators. The index application showed that it described well the encountered conditions at the refugees’ camps in Greece. The index captured near-actual WASH conditions in the selected camps compared to on-site observations— this proved to be of some significant value for the WASH experts. The index can be used to communicate relevant information to multiple levels of operation, from the field teams to donors, and can be incorporated into the monitoring and evaluation process.