About the project
Centering people's experiences to assess WASH adequacy
The School-WISE Scales are survey tools that capture whether WASH services are reliably accessible, acceptable, and adequate to support students' and school staff's needs. They are designed to be applied alongside conventional supply-focused indicators.
Measurement drives action
Good tools produce data that help to evaluate progress, make disparities visible, and identify barriers to equitable access; that support advocacy; and that help to inform the design and implementation of effective policies and programs. While tools for monitoring household WASH conditions have matured considerably over the past two decades, measures for WASH in institutions have not kept pace.
The indicators that do exist for schools focus primarily on the presence of WASH infrastructure: is there a water point, is there a toilet, is there a handwashing station. These are necessary but not sufficient for WASH security. They cannot tell whether a service is meeting the needs of the people who rely on it. A basic sanitation service can exist, for example, but go unused because students do not feel safe using it or consider it too dirty. Without that information, decision-makers are limited in their ability to pinpoint where services are failing and to understand why investments may not produce the intended health and educational benefits.
The School-WISE project addresses this measurement gap by designing tools that evaluate WASH adequacy for diverse users, comparably across contexts and over time.
What the scales measure
The scales ask about people's lived experiences along several dimensions of service delivery: accessibility, acceptability, perceived adequacy, and reliability. These dimensions draw on the normative criteria of the human rights to water and sanitation, under which services must be available, physically accessible, safe, acceptable, and affordable for everyone. Items are written in plain language and ask about experiences over a defined recall period.
Five domains
Water
Availability, perceived safety, and accessibility of water for drinking and for other needs at school.
Sanitation
Accessibility, privacy, safety, and adequacy of sanitation facilities for the people who need them.
Hygiene
Accessibility and adequacy of hygiene facilities for washing hands as desired.
Menstrual health
Ability to manage menstrual needs safely, privately, and with dignity while at school.
Waste management
Adequacy of waste management for maintaining clean classrooms and schoolyards.
Multiple perspectives
Students
Surveys designed to be answerable by students aged 7 years and older.
School staff
Surveys designed to capture the experiences that matter most to teaching and non-teaching staff.
Students and school staff are surveyed concurrently at every site because access to WASH services, and expectations of how well those services should function, can differ between the two groups. Because responses are collected from individuals rather than from the school as a whole, the data support the examination of disparities between students and staff, and by other characteristics such as gender and disability status.
How the study works
The project follows a multi-phase design adapted from the methods behind the Household (HWISE) and Individual (IWISE) Water Insecurity Experiences Scales, which are now validated for use globally, and from published best practice for developing and validating scales.
1Item development
Candidate questions
Candidate survey questions were drawn from a review of existing WASH instruments and from consultation with WASH experts across research, policy, and practice.
2Survey refinement
Cognitive interviews
Cognitive interviews with students and staff are conducted to assess whether respondents interpret the questions as intended, and to understand how they arrive at their answers. Items are then revised or dropped based on what those interviews show.
3Validation
Surveys paired with facility assessments
Surveys are then administered to several hundred students and staff per site and paired with a structured assessment of each school's WASH infrastructure, using observational methods recommended by WHO and UNICEF. This allows direct comparison between experiential WASH insecurity and conventional supply-focused indicators at the same schools.
Once data from across the consortium are harmonized, psychometric analyses will determine which items perform equivalently across sites and constitute the final scale.
Who takes part
In schools, the study works with students aged 7 years and older and with school staff, including teaching and non-teaching roles. A typical site spans about ten schools.
Participation is voluntary and occurs during a single session, held in a private room at the school – respondents may skip any question they prefer not to answer.
Ethics and data protection
Ethical review
The study is approved by the Institutional Review Board of Northwestern University (STU00219169), and local ethical approval is obtained at every site before data collection begins. Site teams provide documentation of local approval and of participant informed consent.
Data protection
Survey responses are collected privately by trained study staff on tablets. Names are not stored with responses, data are held on encrypted, password-protected servers, and access is limited to trained study personnel. Results are never reported in a way that could identify an individual.
Returning results to drive change
Every participating site receives short, policy-relevant summary reports of de-identified findings, written for the people who can act on them: participating schools, local development partners, and government officials.
Part of the WISE Scales family
The School-WISE Scales join a family of validated experiential water insecurity measures: the Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE) Scale and the Individual Water Insecurity Experiences (IWISE) Scale. A parallel instrument for health care facilities, the HCF-WISE Scales, is being developed by the same consortium.