mWater's Sanitation Asset Standard makes sewered and on-site sanitation assets consistent, portable, and understandable across service providers, regulators, development partners, and software platforms.
A pit latrine, vacuum truck, sewer main, pump, and treatment plant all belong to sanitation service chains, yet their records usually sit in unrelated surveys, spreadsheets, proprietary schemas, and regional standards. That prevents comparison, raises switching costs, and forces each organization to rebuild the same conceptual model.
How can one standard describe the diversity of sanitation systems without imposing unnecessary complexity on any individual user?
The work began under USAID IUWASH Tangguh in 2024 and was completed through mWater's own investment in 2026. Product implementation was facilitated by Petri, with the published standard authored by Susan Lamb and shaped through literature review, existing schemas, user needs, and contextual testing.
Fields shared with mWater's Water Asset Standard use the same language, reducing the learning curve and keeping connected infrastructure coherent.
Assets form hierarchies: pumps belong to stations, stations to systems, and service-chain elements connect across collection, transport, and treatment.
No asset type or attribute is mandatory. Conditional fields allow a small operator and a national regulator to use the same model without seeing the same interface.
The specification can be used in spreadsheets, other software, and institutional data models—not only in mWater.
Practitioners can map assets in the mWater mobile app, import them through the Portal, or use an AI assistant through the MCP server to align existing records with the standard. Survey monitoring and Workflows then attach operational history to the permanent asset records.