SHRI focuses on providing high quality sanitation services in the community and institutional sanitation facilities by deploying operating and monitoring systems. We believe using such data-driven approach, we can strengthen sanitation systems in India and beyond.

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Operating system includes hiring staff from the local community who are responsible for cleaning the facility multiple times per day, keeping the facility safe during operating hours. It further includes that the facility has consumables (soap, cleaning materials, etc), and electrical, plumbing, and infrastructure issues are rectified by the facility staff and coordinators in a timely manner so that service delivery is not interrupted. 

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Monitoring system includes training our staff to use SHRI’s digital systems and track use, quality, and accessibility metrics as explained below. 

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1. Use & quality: SHRI installs automatic people counting machines that accurately track facility use by women, girls, men, and boys. Furthermore, SHRI tracks various quality indicators such as cleanliness, staff attendance, availability of consumables (soap), electrical issues, and plumbing issues. These data are collected by staff who use SHRI’s digital daily issues form on-KoboToolbox, which is an open-source data collection, management, and visualization platform.
   
   The use and quality data are compiled into daily reports that are reviewed by SHRI’s facility staff and area managers. These reports provide invaluable insights into facility performance and are used to inform what issues need to be rectified in a timely manner in order to promote consistent use. We have partnered with-Tech4Dev-to scale our systems even further using-Dalgo-systems.-Tech4Dev-is an organization that works with not-for-profits like SHRI, to streamline and automate their data systems.
   
   Additionally, these data are uploaded to SHRI’s online dashboard. This dashboard allows stakeholders, such as funders, the government, and community members, to view the performance of each SHRI facility and serves as a mechanism for accountability. SHRI’s online dashboard provides real-time insights into the attributes of a given facility. These data driven insights from dashboard aid in continuous facility improvement and thus strengthen our goal to provide high quality services to everyone, everywhere. Previously our data was manually uploaded to the dashboard, now the dashboard is updated automatically which reduces error, improves reliability, and allows our staff to focus on other aspects of facility management.
    

2. Access: SHRI monitors the accessibility of its facilities by tracking the number of hours a facility is offline during a day, and the number of days a facility is offline during a month. Inclement weather, festivals, local weddings, and maintenance issues are some factors that impact our operations and thus facility use. However, our goal is to minimize downtimes and help community members overcome barriers to consistent use of high-quality services at our facilities.

SHRI has been praised by funders, policy makers and other stakeholders for its unique focus on monitoring systems in ensuring continuous facility improvement and thus inching towards our goal to provide high quality services to everyone, everywhere. We see operating and monitoring systems fueling each other in this regard and so believe that this monitoring model can be applied to existing community and institutional sanitation infrastructure. For example, it can be deployed at the millions of school based sanitation facilities or health facilities throughout India that currently have no provisions for monitoring the use and quality of the facilities. In bringing this system to such community and institutional facilities, we can help ensure that the people who rely on this infrastructure for their sanitation needs receive consistently high-quality services.