South Sudan WASH Baseline: Akobo County, South Sudan

In September of 2015, the South Sudan WASH Cluster, along with the humanitarian community across the country, undertook the Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO) process in order to quantify the overall needs and vulnerabilities of the population affected by crises. It was this process that brought to light the large WASH-specific data gap across South Sudan, more specifically the fact that the various assessment formats that WASH actors used to collect baseline data were incompatible and incomparable and could not be analysed against each other. This lack of inter-operable data made it challenging to quantify needs and more importantly, to rank the severity of the WASH situation in the different administrative areas.

To address this information gap, REACH Assessment Specialist, which supports the global WASH Cluster, was deployed to South Sudan in order to support the country WASH Cluster to harmonize assessments between the various partners by developing a baseline assessment tool. This tool was designed to collect the minimum amount of data necessary in order to assess the WASH needs and vulnerabilities at the household level. The tool was finalized and a pilot was set for Akobo County – located in the north-eastern part of Jonglei State and severely hit by insecurity as a result of the attempted coup of December 2013. The first half of data collection took place between January 25th and 29th 2016 and covered the eastern part of the Akobo County, namely Bilkey, Dengjok, Gakdong and Nyandit payams.