Call for standard approach to assessing water supply functionality

New UPGro paper “The need for a standard approach to assessing the functionality of rural community water supplies”

by  Helen Bonsor,  Alan MacDonald, Vincent Casey, Richard Carter and Paul Wilson. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10040-017-1711-0

The Sustainable Development Goals have set an agenda for transformational change in water access, aiming for secure household connections globally. Despite this goal, communal groundwater supplies are likely to remain the main source of improved water supplies for many rural areas in Africa and South Asia for decades to come.

Understanding the poor functionality of existing communal supplies remains, therefore, a priority. A critical first step is to establish a sector-wide definition of borehole supply functionality and a standard method of its assessment.

Key points

• Groundwater plays a central role in Increasing safe water access – particularly in Africa and Asia, but has there are long-running challenges in keeping such supplies working.
• “Functionality” is term often used as a measurable indicator of whether a water point is working or not.
• The most common definition of “functionality” is a binary “is it working at time of inspection? Yes/No” However, this is just one of six approaches to defining water point functionality.
• A tiered assessment is recommended based on flow quantity, quality and downtime period(s) over the previous year
• Having a standardised approach to assessing functionality is important to allow data from different locations and different times to be compared so that the deeper, systematic complexities and failures can be better understood and addressed.