About us

This site is aimed at the general public, water professionals and managers of public and private entities where water is an important issue. It makes the Water4allSDGs application available free of charge to them worldwide. This application allows them to identify and assess the main contributions to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of a water project, policy or strategy using the Water4allSDGs© methodology.

You don't need to know the details of the 2030 Agenda yourself to be able to make an assessment against its 169 specific goals, known as SDG targets. Water4allSDGs is an educational and decision support tool to help make better use of the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda in water-related actions.

This website and its application have been developed by the French Water Partnership (FWP), a reference platform for French public and private water stakeholders active at the international level: the central government, local and parliamentary authorities, public and private companies, research institutions, NGOs and experts. Between the Rio+20 Summit in 2012 and the adoption of the 2030 Agenda and its 17 SDGs in 2015, the FWP contributed to the insertion of the twenty or so SDG targets directly related to water, and then to the identification of progress monitoring indicators adapted to these targets.

Since 2015, the FWP has carried out intense advocacy at the international level to facilitate the achievement of the ambitions of the 2030 Agenda. It has also been involved in raising awareness of and using the SDGs throughout France and in building France's strategy for the 2030 Agenda. Its efforts to publicise the SDG targets have highlighted the complexity of the 2030 Agenda, inherent in its broad ambition. This real difficulty makes it almost impossible for a non-specialist on the SDGs to attempt to assess the relevance of a project, action or policy with respect to all the SDGs. This leads most professionals, even the most motivated ones, to consider only one or, at most, a few of the SDG targets, which does not fully respect the ambition of the 2030 Agenda.

Faced with this difficulty, which hindered the proper use of the SDGs in the water community, one of the FWP members designed a methodology that allows a decision-maker to assess the relevance of a water-related action with respect to the SDGs, without needing to know the details of the SDGs and therefore without needing to face their complexity.

This methodology, called Water4allSDGs©, pre-identifies a large number of situations with positive or negative impacts on the SDG targets.

Applied to the water sector, it allows any decision-maker to select the situations that may concern his or her "project" and to estimate the degree of proximity between the latter and these pre-identified situations. This information is sufficient to determine the SDG targets impacted by the "project" and give an idea of the importance of each impact.

The web application on this site implements the Water4allSDGs© methodology in the water sector, with the permission of its author, who has also authorised the use of the same name for the application on this site. This application makes it easy for anyone who is not an expert on the SDGs to identify the nature and extent of contributions to all the SDG targets of a water project, policy or strategy.

The main output of the assessment is a detailed list of the contributions of the "project" to the different SDG targets and a graph summarising the impacted SDGs and the respective importance of these impacts.

A user can download and save to his/her computer a PDF file containing this graph and the list of contributions of his/her "project" to the SDG targets and their justifications.

The application uses a system of scales to establish scores, target by target. These scores are not very accurate. However, based on specific questions, they are much more 'objective' and reliable than the 'guesstimates' or 'wet-finger' estimates usually encountered in the water sector, which very often do not even take into account the precise wording of the SDG targets and omit some potential impacts of projects that are not easily identified.

The aim of Water4allSDGs is thus to enable a non-specialist on the SDGs to identify the strongest contributions of a "project" to the SDG targets. The application also helps to understand the wording and precise objectives of the corresponding SDG targets. Furthermore, it facilitates the understanding of the 2030 Agenda despite its high complexity. Water4allSDGs does not offer a thorough analysis of the contributions, but prepares information for such an analysis that can be done later on the basis of the results of using this site.

A pilot tool of this application was used in March, June and October 2021 by the international jury for the Dakar 2022 label of the 9th World Water Forum to evaluate the contributions to the SDGs of the projects that had requested this label. Then from January 2022, this Jury has used the web application itself. This operational use showed the relevance of this methodology by revealing contributions that the jury experts had not naturally thought of and by objectifying the relative importance of these contributions.

This application makes the many interactions between the SDGs more concrete by showing that a water action that contributes to progress towards one SDG6 target very often contributes to many SDG targets outside SDG6. It also makes visible potential negative impacts, thus paving the way for corrective or compensatory measures.

We are confident that many users will want to improve some aspects of this application. We invite any reviewers to contact us with feedback and suggestions for improvement.

How to contact us

The Water4allSDGs© FWP Development Team