A/67/270 slums, which is about one third of the urban population. 36 There are many causes for their lack of access to services, including deliberate exclusion, in laws and policies, of informal settlements from formal water and sanitation services. This kind of exclusion can lead to increased inequity, as slum dwellers have little choice but to pay exceedingly high prices to informal providers for poor or irregular levels of service. 59. Identifying and defining slums can pose a challenge for monitoring, but significant advances have been made in recent years, including by groups working with slum dweller organizations and through spatial analysis. Assessing slums by their spatial dimension — their location — could both yield more accurate data and serve as an effective link to planning. Indicators should be designed specifically for capturing the difference between slum and non-slum households. In addition, the definition of slums needs improvement; the best approach may be to use country definitions themselves. Those responsible for implementing major household surveys are encouraged to undertake special slum surveys, commit to oversampling in slum areas, and explore the use of data gathered by slum dweller organizations. 60. Emerging data sources and methods that include attention to equity and equality information should be further utilized even though preliminary reviews suggest that these approaches are still at an embryonic stage. The use of new technologies linked to mobile telephones and crowd-sourcing, for example, in relation to slums, can assist to rapidly expand data-gathering and monitoring in a participatory and transparent manner. For example, WaterAid and partners carry out water point mapping with global positioning system techniques to assist local governments to address existing disparities in the allocation of resources for water points and wells in both rural and urban areas, and this has also helped to identify political partisanship. 37 C. Focus on inequities, shedding light on the poorest of the poor 61. As the Joint Monitoring Programme has demonstrated in recent years, wealth inequality correlates in many countries to inequalities in access to adequate water and sanitation. The rate of progress is very uneven among wealth quintiles in many countries, with the poorest two quintiles frequently experiencing lack of improvement while other quintiles experience significant improvements. In other countries, progress has been impressive among the lower quintiles, and lessons could be drawn from these experiences. Some Governments are reacting to this analysis by reassessing their policies and programming to target resources on those living in poverty. One of the countries visited by the Special Rapporteur earmarked a percentage of the budget for sanitation in rural areas, since these are traditionally poorer than urban ones. In another country, the Government created a revolving fund for access to intradomiciliary water connections in smaller villages, where inhabitants were poor and could not afford to buy the hardware in one instalment. 62. In presenting this wealth-quintile analysis, the Joint Monitoring Programme went beyond the requirement to provide the basic data required to report on the __________________ 36 37 12-45653 See WHO and United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Hidden Cities: Unmasking and Overcoming Health Inequities in Urban Settings (Geneva, 2010). See http://www.wateraid.org/uk/what_we_do/how_we_work/wash_matters/10092.asp. 17