How do you build a national inventory of water points and facilities?
Register each water point, school, health facility or community as a site, then monitor it with surveys over time. Because the survey attaches to the site rather than standing alone, you get a history per facility instead of a series of unconnected snapshots.
The difference between a survey and an information system is whether you can find the same water point again next year. A one-off census gives a coverage number that ages immediately. An inventory of sites, each carrying its own monitoring history, is what lets a ministry see whether a district is improving, which facilities keep failing, and where investment has already gone. It is also the layer that makes de-duplication and administrative reporting tractable.
How to do it
Decide which site types you are inventorying. Water points, communities, health facilities, schools and others are separate tables with their own properties.
Register the sites, either by collecting them in the field or by importing an existing list with its coordinates.
Set each site's privacy so it is clear who may view and edit it, and share what should be shared with the wider sector.
Let administrative regions be assigned from coordinates, so district and region reporting works without manual tagging.
Monitor the sites with recurring surveys that link back to the site, building a history per facility.
Run the deduplicator when several teams have been mapping the same area, so one facility is one record.
Report from the site tables in dashboards, maps and datagrids that update as new monitoring arrives.