Solstice: an operational data system for governance
One free platform where a public agency keeps its records, runs its daily work, and produces its reporting from the same data.
Most data systems built for governments in low-resource regions are reporting systems. They collect information on a cycle, aggregate it, and pass it upward. The district compiles for the province, the province for the ministry, the ministry for the donor and the global goals. By the time the report is written, the situation it describes has changed, and no one along that chain used the data to decide what to do next week.
An operational data system works the other way around. Staff use it to do their jobs. A field officer records a broken borehole against the borehole's existing record. A district officer reviews the report and assigns the repair. The technician records the work. A supervisor verifies it and closes the case. The monthly report is then produced from those same records, because the records are current. Data quality stops being a compliance exercise and becomes a byproduct of people using the system to get their work done.
Solstice is an operational data system for government, and it is free for unlimited use.
Why reporting systems fail to change anything
Monitoring and evaluation was designed around the project: a baseline, an endline, a report to the funder. That design has two weaknesses that governments feel every day. Corrections cannot be made mid-stream, because the data arrives at the end. And success is judged by whether the funder renews, not by whether services improved for the people using them.
The cost of the gap is measurable. Between a problem existing and someone accountable acting on it, service deteriorates, revenue falls, and users return to unsafe sources. Foster and colleagues priced the ten-year difference between community-managed and professionally maintained water systems in Kitui County, Kenya, at USD 30 per person for handpumps and USD 154 per person for piped schemes serving more than a thousand people. Most of that difference comes from the speed and reliability of maintenance, which is a question of coordination rather than of hardware.
The timing makes this urgent. Aid commitments for water supply and sanitation fell 9 percent between 2022 and 2023, and preliminary OECD figures show total official development assistance contracting by 23.1 percent in real terms in 2025, the largest annual contraction on record. Fewer than 13 percent of countries report having enough money and staff to carry out the WASH plans they already have. Governments are being asked to hold service levels with less support and shorter project cycles. A defined process, and the data it produces, is one of the few assets an agency keeps when the project officer, the consultant, and the grant all leave.
What an operational data system has to do
Four capabilities separate a system that runs the work from one that only describes it. Solstice provides all four on one platform, so that a district officer, a regulator, and a minister work from the same records at the level of detail their responsibilities require.
Records that persist
A water point, a school, a clinic, a pump, or a permit holder has one record with a stable identifier, and every inspection updates that record's history. Systems that create a fresh row for each survey cannot tell you what changed. Solstice holds more than 7.5 million infrastructure sites this way, along with the inventories, asset registries, and customer records attached to them.
Collection that works where staff work
Field staff collect on Android, iOS, or a browser, fully offline, and records sync when a connection returns. Forms are designed in a visual editor with no code, localized into any language, and validated on the device so errors are caught before they enter the database.
Work that gets assigned, tracked, and closed
Workflows turn a written procedure into a running process: steps, roles, automations, notifications, and escalation when something stalls. Since their release in late 2025, organizations have created nearly ten thousand workflow instances across about 170 workflow types. Teams run repair and maintenance, household connection pipelines, procurement, installation tracking, quality monitoring, kiosk operations, and public health case notification.
Analysis from the same records
Dashboards, maps, pivot tables, and indicators read the live operational data, not a separate reporting extract. Managers can see which cases have been open longest and which districts have not reported, next to the performance indicators they answer for. An AI assistant builds dashboard widgets from a plain-language description, which lowers the expertise a small team needs to make its own data useful.
One platform across sectors
The aid industry inherited the silo structure of university departments: water here, maternal health there, agriculture somewhere else. Governments do not work that way. A health clinic without safe water is a maternal mortality problem and a water problem at once, and for years neither sector measured it, because neither sector's monitoring asked.
Solstice removes the technical reason for that separation. Data collected for one purpose is available to another at the indicator level, and the Global Indicator Library holds standardized question sets wired to the indicators they calculate, so that two agencies collecting independently produce comparable numbers. A ministry can run water services, institutional WASH, health facility monitoring, education infrastructure, environmental data, and program monitoring in one system with one set of definitions, and let each department see only what its mandate requires.
The platform also connects to what an agency already runs. The Integrator builds two-way integrations with any system that has an API, on a schedule, without custom code. Agencies use it to bring in borehole logger readings, smart meter consumption, laboratory results, DHIS2 indicators, satellite drought and flood products, weather data, and accounting transactions. Any dataset can be published as a live endpoint that Power BI, Tableau, QGIS, ArcGIS, or a national MIS reads whenever it needs current figures. Where specialist software is the right tool, such as AQUARIUS, WISKI, or Delft-FEWS for hydrological modeling, Solstice is designed to work alongside it rather than replace it.
The government keeps control
An operational system holds the records an agency depends on, so ownership and continuity matter more than features. The government owns its data and decides what is public, protected, or private. Access is structured by organization, team, and custom role, and administration is assigned to government roles so that access survives staff transfers. Activity logs track logins, edits, and approvals, and point in time recovery allows a bad change to be rolled back.
Every record can be exported at any time through the API or as standard spatial and tabular files, so leaving is always possible. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, two-factor authentication is available, an independent security audit was completed in 2023, and the platform recorded 99.985 percent uptime in 2024. More than 70 percent of the codebase is open source, the platform operates as a Digital Public Good, and parts of the code are held in escrow by international partners including WaterAid so that the system can continue even if this organization cannot.
Why it is free, and how that is sustained
Agencies reasonably ask what the catch is. Solstice is run by a non-profit that has operated continuously since 2012. Development is funded by contracts, grants, and service agreements with around twenty donors and clients, not by license fees, so the platform does not depend on charging governments to use it.
This changes what a funder's money buys. When a partner pays for a new feature, we build it and release it to every user in every country, permanently. Workflows were funded by UNICEF Madagascar and are now free for all 390,000 users. The Integrator was funded the same way. A foundation or agency that funds platform development is not buying a tool for one project or one country; it is adding a capability to the sector that no one has to pay for again. About 99 percent of our users operate without any contact with our team.
For organizations that want hands-on help, Stellar Data provides advanced technical assistance, professional services, and higher data limits on a commercial basis. All profits return to the Foundation, and no existing platform feature has ever moved behind a paywall.
What governments have built on it
More than ten countries use the platform as part or all of their national monitoring system, and 30 or more national, regional, and local agencies work with us directly.
The Department of National Planning and Monitoring leads a national WASH monitoring system that brings community, school, health facility, and project data together for planning and investment. Read the case study
The Ministry of Water and Environment runs RUMIS, the Rural and Urban Management Information System, for nationwide management of water data across local, district, and national government. Read the case study
The Ministry of Health and Child Care combines drinking water quality, sanitation, and institutional WASH monitoring in one management information system. Explore the government portal
The national water and sanitation authority DINEPA standardized utility reporting on assets, customers, and financial performance.
We are building a system with UNICEF and three ministries that unifies WASH, climate, and disaster risk data. Governments in Indonesia, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, and Kenya run national or subnational systems as well.
Across all users, the platform now holds the following:
How to start
Any government can start today at no cost, and many do long before they contact us. Sign up, build a form, and collect data the same week.
For an official national system, we work with the ministry or authority that will own it. The usual sequence is a review of the datasets and reporting the agency already has, a system design agreed with the stakeholders who will use it, configuration of forms, dashboards, and workflows, training, and handover. Training is sized to the role: about four hours for staff who collect data and read dashboards, sixteen for staff who build surveys and analyze data, and forty for the administrators who will run the system without us.
The aim throughout is a government team that maintains and extends the system itself. Because the platform is free and open, that team continues to operate it with no licensing cost and no dependence on outside specialists.
Talk to us about your system
If your agency or program is planning a system, write to info@mwater.co. We can share terms of reference, sample statements of work, and cost estimates from comparable programs.
Where to go next
These four pages cover the questions that follow this one most often, from procurement requirements to the first form a team builds.
- National water monitoring for governmentsWhat a national water system on the platform covers, answered against the requirements that appear in procurements.
- How to design a government MISThe five decisions to settle before building: management decisions, indicators, people and workflows, government control, and long-term operation.
- The platform, feature by featureCollection, design, analysis, and collaboration, with the apps and the portal.
- Start freeCreate an account and build your first form today. No license, no per-user fee, no sales call.
Solstice, mWater, and Juno
Solstice, mWater, and Juno are three names for one platform. The work began in 2012 as mWater, a tool for monitoring water quality, and mWater remains the name used in the water and sanitation sector. Solstice serves all development sectors, and Juno serves environment and natural resources. An account on any of them reaches the same data, the same features, and the same free terms.
The name comes from the first data point humans tracked over time. Twice a year in each hemisphere, the sun reaches its highest or lowest point in the sky. People recorded that day to know where they stood in the year and when the growing season would return. We named the platform Solstice for that tradition: measuring so that you can manage.