Selecting Comparison Districts

Stanford University’s Program on Water, Health & Development (WHD) is working to evaluate aspects of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s (Foundation) Safe Water Strategy. For example, the Foundation is interested in knowing whether access to basic and safely managed water services is expanding more rapidly in focus districts than in comparable districts where the Foundation is not currently active. The following briefing note describes the approach that the WHD team has adopted to assess the impact of the Foundation’s investment model on water service levels in the focus districts of Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Uganda.