Abstract
Rural water systems in low-income countries often fail to deliver potable water sustainably. Reasons include socio-economic, financial, and technical challenges that are specific to the community. Improved assessment methods are critical if decision makers want to provide sustainable solutions; however, to be useful, such methods require substantial data about the complex interaction between people, water, and infrastructure. Such interaction is affected by, and in turn, affects the behavior of community members regarding water usage, resources for infrastructure maintenance, and choice of assets. Unfortunately, much of these data are not readily available, in a large part because of the site-specific context associated with each rural community. Because of the difficulty and expense in obtaining site-specific data, it is important to identify the most critical needs for field studies versus the data that can be obtained from sources such as non-governmental organizations and the general literature. We examine this issue by first using an extensive data set from Malawi to identify the critical data needs. We then present several examples of field studies in Honduras and Uganda where we collected some of that critical data. Throughout, we discuss best practices for conducting and using focused field studies versus the general literature.
Highlights
Despite progress in providing sustainable access to safe drinking water
Interview water board members to understand “first response” strategies when a problem arises with the water system and develop a corresponding metric to analyze their circumstantial effectiveness. Our goals for this project include identifying the critical data needs for sustainability assessment, evaluating what can be obtained from the literature versus what should be obtained from field studies, and discussing some best practices for such data collection
Based on the extensive field data set for Malawi along with previously published reports, we determined the key characteristics about a community water system for which data is needed according to water users, the water system, and the water board
Summary
Despite progress in providing sustainable access to safe drinking water Development Goal 7 and a contributing element to most of the other Millennium Development Goals), many water systems in the developing world fail within a few years of installation. 2009 WaterAid study from Tanzania found that nearly half of improved public water points in rural areas are not functioning, and 25% of systems are inoperable after only two years following installation [1]. These systems fail at such high rates in large part because the sustainability of a rural water system in a low-income country depends on “the relationship of the user with the life cycle of the water system” [2]. Schweitzer et al examined the predictors of sustainable water system management in the Dominican Republic and found the highest correlation with life cycle characteristics such as system age, plumber wages, and time spent on maintenance [4]
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