A/HRC/24/44 D. Ensuring participation and empowerment 76. The participation of concerned communities in decision-making processes is a human rights principle and a human right in itself. Some see it as a hurdle as it costs money and time. However, meaningful participation is also a guarantee of sustainability – as the integral basic sanitation (SABA) model in Peru or the safe water committees in Nicaragua have shown, the participation of communities in the design, construction, management and operation of services creates a greater willingness to use and to pay for water and sanitation, and better entrenches hygiene habits. True participation requires meaningful opportunities to freely and actively influence decisions, not mere superficial consultation or information sharing (A/HRC/18/33, paras. 68-69). Such a process entails providing information through multiple channels, enabling participation in transparent and inclusive processes, ensuring that funds are appropriately spent on interventions that are needed and strengthening the capacities of individuals and civil society to engage (ibid.). E. Effective monitoring and independent regulation 77. A well-structured system of monitoring will incorporate indicators and collect disaggregated data to determine if access to water and sanitation is sustained and nondiscriminatory. Governments must look beyond the averages and aggregated data to consider inequalities based on where an individual lives, the wealth quintile he or she is in, to which ethnic group he or she belongs, and how other forms of discrimination affect him or her. Moreover they must monitor whether services are sustained, and in cases of slippage must collect information on the reasons for the latter. 78. Strong community-based monitoring strategies can improve how information is specifically disaggregated to identify marginalized groups and the reasons why retrogressions or slippages occur. This also promotes transparency, participation and accountability, as the community becomes more involved and information becomes easily accessible. 79. The monitoring of sustainability is not being undertaken in a systematic manner. Only 7 per cent of total investments in water are devoted to maintenance and monitoring;72 and water systems are rarely visited after being built. One of the reasons for this lack of sustainability monitoring might reside in the fact that the Millennium Development Goals framework counts only the numbers of those who have gained access, ignoring whether anyone among those have lost access. 80. Donors increasingly advocate for comprehensive systems for monitoring the sustainability of water and sanitation interventions. Some seek to include a sustainability clause in their contracts with implementers as a means to verify whether sustainability criteria are being met. Similarly, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has developed sustainability checks aimed at auditing the water supply and open-defecationfree status of communities after the project has ended. These checks examine several institutional, social, technical and financial indicators to measure sustainability. From a human rights perspective, it is crucial to complement such tools with equality criteria to ensure that all in society benefit. Moreover, such sustainability checks must not be perceived as a donor-driven initiative applied on a project level, but must be incorporated more broadly in the sector. 81. When it comes to the adoption of policies that might have a detrimental effect on the human rights to water and sanitation, ex ante and ex post human rights assessments are 72 20 GLAAS Report, p. 4.