The International Benchmarking Network for the Water and Wastewater Utilities (IB-NET), funded by the Department for International Development (DfID) of the United Kingdom and managed by the World Bank, aims to reduce the information gaps in the sector by providing tools and methods to measure sector performance. IB-NET also provides public access to utility performance indicators that can act as benchmarks for utilities and other sector professionals interested in improving performance in the water and sanitation sector.

 

What is IB-NET?

IB-NET provides a set of tools for water and sanitation utilities to measure their performance both against their past performance and against similar utilities at the national, regional and global levels.

 

IB-NET consists of three major tools. The first is the IB-NET data collection toolkit, with a set of data to be completed and instructions as to which precise data to enter. The second tool is a continuously renewable database of water and sewerage utilities’ performance. This database provides utilities and other sector stakeholders the opportunity to search for data in different formats and also allows for simple benchmarking of utility data. The benchmarking tool enables the utility to compare itself to other utilities that share similar characteristics (e.g. size, factors related to location, and management structure). A third tool provides data on participating agencies that can help organizations interested in measuring utility performance to contact neighboring utilities as well as other organizations, and as such build local networks for performance assessment and benchmarking.