‘Equal Aqua – Breaking Barriers’ Dashboard – 2026 Updates

The Equal Aqua Breaking Barriers tool, first launched in 2022, continues to evolve as an open data application focused on women’s employment and leadership in the water sector, with updates released almost every year.

The tool was developed by Derilinx for the World Bank Group (WBG), which owns the underlying data and methodology. The latest update (March 2026) expands the WBG’s dataset to cover 300+ water institutions across more than 50 countries, strengthening its value for benchmarking and comparative analysis across both water supply and sanitation, and water resource management institutions.

What’s New

This update focuses on improving usability while enabling deeper exploration of the data.

• A refreshed dashboard design with a new colour scheme and improved responsiveness
• A more comprehensive About page, bringing together methodology, definitions, and data sources
• An enhanced homepage with a story map to better guide users through the context behind the data (coming soon).

New Interactive Map

The main addition in this release is a full-page interactive map, designed to make geographic exploration more intuitive and more useful in practice.

In addition to global and regional views, the map introduces country-level detail, allowing users to explore how individual countries compare across indicators. New grouping options, including income level and the World Bank’s fragility, conflict and violence (FCV) classification, provide further ways to analyse patterns across different contexts.

Clicking on a country opens a side panel with a comparison chart showing how it performs against regional and global averages. These charts can be downloaded as images, making them easy to reuse in reports and presentations. At the same time, global and regional benchmarks remain visible and update dynamically based on the selected indicator.

The map also includes practical features such as zooming to selected regions and downloading the full WBG dataset as a CSV.

Why it Matters

The result is a more usable tool in practice, moving beyond exploration into something that can support real analysis. It makes it easier to compare performance, explore patterns across regions and contexts, and reuse the WBG’s data and visuals directly in reporting and analysis. What previously required additional processing can now be done within the tool itself, making it more relevant for day-to-day use.

More about the tool

The Breaking Barriers tool illustrates gender gaps in employment drawing on survey results from the Women in Water Utilities: Breaking Barriers report, and additional surveys collected as part of the Equal Aqua platform. It contains global and regional averages for gender diversity, inclusive policies, and female-friendly work environments. Institutions can use it to compare their performance to other institutions in their region and globally.

Check the previous updates on this blog post.