Analytical utility of the JMP school water, sanitation and hygiene global monitoring data

Recent progress in the Joint Monitoring Programme’s Sustainable Development Goal 6 monitoring efforts may help build the quantitative evidence base for driving global action around school water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure. To evaluate the analytical value of the expanding database for generating research evidence, we model the relationships between school WASH conditions and student enrolment within select low- and middle-income countries. Using a series of incrementally adjusted linear regressions, we find that there is sufficient variation in the dataset to detect signals of significance with some consistency, including significant associations between the presence and quality of toilets among primary school students and the quality of toilets among secondary school students, particularly among girls. These findings may suggest that the data are amenable to statistical analysis and that there are interesting relationships between school WASH and education to study further at the global level, as well as potential synergies to harness across goals for advancing sustainable development more effectively. However, given their current incompleteness, the data are unable to support rigorous statistical analyses that can supply high-quality evidence. Based on our study, we offer several recommendations to enhance data utility and guide future analyses.