Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene September - October 2016 Vol. 11 No.4 | Page 37

Hygiene

Also in the research, three quarters (75%) of consumers
said they wouldn’t risk dining at a restaurant that had
been implicated in a food hygiene incident, even if
recommended by someone that they trust. Customers
would even rather put up with poor service from rude and
unhelpful staff than eat at dirty restaurants.
Some 66% of respondents rated unclean or dirty premises
as the first or second reason for not returning to a
restaurant. Just 16% cited slow or poor service and 32%
said rude or unhelpful staff would stop them coming back
to a restaurant.
“The food business is incredibly competitive, with nearly
60% of restaurants failing in their first three years of
operation,” says David Davies, managing director, Checkit.
“Our research shows that good food hygiene is the
number one factor in where diners choose to eat - and
that they simply won’t return to places where there has
been a food hygiene incident. Yet our analysis finds that
nearly 20,000 restaurants require improvement to meet
basic Food Standards Agency standards. Owners of food
businesses are risking their revenues and survival, as well
as the health of their customers, by not taking hygiene
seriously.”

You can find answers to these and many other questions
on our global website www.ib-net.org. Go to its
performance database or its separate tariff database and
get your answers! You can be one of nearly 8,000 people
that visit the site each month to access a set of standard
reports for a range of comparisons, benchmarking and
assessments for more than 5,000 water utilities from 150
countries.
The International Benchmarking Network of Water
and Sanitation Utilities (IBNET) has evolved from the
pioneering works of the International Water Association
in 1992-1997, and was adapted for utilities in developing
countries. It provides standard definitions for data and
indicators, calculation rules for each of the indicators,
as well as aggregation mechanisms to compare between
utilities and groups of utilities within countries, regions
and the world.
If you or your colleagues are preparing a project in a
specific country or utility, then IBNET will give you
information on your utility, allow you to make a standard
report, and get rich information on water services in
that country or utility, incuding coverage, leakage levels,
collection rates and tariffs. All information is standardized;
it can be downloaded and can be embedded into your
reports.
• If you want an aggregated country level profile
then visit: https://database.ib-net.org/country_
profile?ctry=68
• If you are just looking for a specific utility profile
then visit: https://database.ib-net.org/utility_
profile?uid=12

Turning on the faucet: the water supply system in Bella Vista, Las Lomas,
province of Cocle, Panama. Photo credit: Gerardo Pesantez / World Bank

IBNET: Water and sanitation utility costs,
charges and performance data at your
fingertips
Ask your child: “Where does our water come from?” And
many of them might roll their eyes at being asked such a
silly question, and tell you: “Water comes from the tap.”
But how? What is the name of the company that provides
the service to you? How much does your water service
cost? Is it expensive? Where does your wastewater go? Is
it treated prior to discharge? How many people get water
from the utility in your town?

A separate tariff database gives you a chance to get
information on domestic tariffs from 190 countries.
It gives you information on water price for different
types of consumers, tariff structures, and most
importantly, sources of all information can be
checked, verified and updated.
The IBNET team spends a lot of time on data quality.
Our tools have more than 70 filters that prevent the input
of wrong information and inform us of outliers and
duplicates. We also have a data verification protocol that
allows more rigorous checks on data quality.
IBNET is the tool of choice for more than 20 on-going
projects in the Bank. Every year this number is increasing.
IBNET tools are expanding further, and are becoming
true international instruments: utilities, international and
national water utility associations like www.danubis.org,
www.pwwa.ws, etc. are all using IBNET.

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