Monitoring Water and Sanitation Service Convergence in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Reproducible World Bank Panel, 2000-2023

Access to basic water and sanitation is central to public health and Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6). We assemble a reproducible, provenance-locked World Bank panel for 26 Latin-American and Caribbean (LAC) economies over 2000-2023 (624 country-years) from openly licensed (CC BY 4.0) indicators, re-acquired with a strict country lock that excludes every World Bank regional aggregate and admits only the 26 economies, validated by automated parser tests. Basic drinking-water coverage averages 95.08% and basic sanitation 87.45% in 2023, with wide dispersion (from about 72.6% to near-universal). Cross-country dispersion narrows over the period (water coefficient of variation 0.1055 in 2000 to 0.062 in 2023; sanitation 0.2385 to 0.1724); beta convergence is statistically significant for water (beta=-0.524, p <0.001) and the service index (beta=-0.299, p 0.022) but not for sanitation (beta=-0.2347, p 0.153). The mean urban-rural basic-water gap is 8.43 percentage points (2023). In a two-way fixed-effects specification the WASH service index is inversely associated with under-five mortality within countries (coefficient -1.1685, p <0.001; within-R2 0.6265; n 584) - an association, not a causal effect. A descriptive typology is reported. All numbers regenerate from archived bytes (SHA-256). We make no causal or SDG-success claims and do not assess short-run shocks; the contribution is an open, auditable WASH monitoring panel and a transparently bounded reading of LAC service convergence.