Abstract
Rainfall variability and socioeconomic shocks pose a revenue risk for drinking water services in rural Africa. We examine the year-on-year and seasonal relationship between rainfall and remotely monitored water usage from rural piped schemes in four sub-Saharan countries to identify patterns that warn of a threat to operational sustainability. Continuous monitoring of socio-climatic interactions can reveal distributions and magnitudes of risk and guide policy action to safeguard rural water services.
Highlights
Despite substantial progress over several decades, more than 500 million rural Africans still live without access to safe, affordable, and reliable drinking water services[1]
It is difficult to anticipate when, where, and how shocks will converge to threaten viability of rural drinking water services because cost, complexity, and timeliness often prevent the measurement of direct indicators
We explore how year-on-year and seasonal changes in rainfall and metered water usage can be interpreted to anticipate a revenue risk for rural drinking water services arising from the convergence of socioeconomic and climatic shocks
Summary
Despite substantial progress over several decades, more than 500 million rural Africans still live without access to safe, affordable, and reliable drinking water services[1]. We explore how year-on-year and seasonal changes in rainfall and metered water usage can be interpreted to anticipate a revenue risk for rural drinking water services arising from the convergence of socioeconomic and climatic shocks. We combine 29 years of geospatial, monthly total rainfall estimates with 299 months of metered, remotely transmitted water usage records between 2016 and 2020 corresponding to 25 rural piped schemes in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda.
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