My name is Jacob Katuva and I’m a researcher with Oxford University. I largely work in the water and poverty area. My research has been in Kenya – Kwale County specifically – where I’ve been looking at the links between water and welfare. Kwale County has a population of close to 900,000 people. The majority of the people there – over 70% – live below the poverty line and the main source of water for the community drinking water supplies is groundwater through handpumps.
We did a socioeconomic survey in Kwale County where we interviewed 3500 households or thereabouts in the year 2014. We repeated the same survey on the same households again in the year 2015 and the year 2016. In terms of analysis, we developed a welfare index from about 29 indicators from the socioeconomic survey and we had weights which were informed by Principle Component Analysis and this welfare index was computed for all the three years and we were able to actually see the changes in welfare and we were also able to map all the households and understand where the poor are and what their needs are.
Moving on, we investigated the links between water and welfare and what we found was that water services and here I’m talking about reliability, affordability, safety of water, and proximity to water infrastructure – all this actually accounts for at least 20% of the variation in household welfare which was quite substantial.
Findings from this work have been developed into policy briefs. Different policy briefs have been shared with different departments within the County Government, and also the Governor.
In terms of modelling welfare, we found that there are four priority goals that the County needs to focus on for sustainable development in the county. So if they want to improve people’s welfare they need to focus on four priority goals. Number one: The first goal is to maintain primary education while maintaining access to primary education; Number two is to improve access to reliable, affordable and safe drinking water sources within the county; Number three is to improve access to household energy sources by expanding the national grid or also investing in small scale solar systems; and the final priority goal was to end open defecation as this was the largest cause of reduced welfare in Kwale County.
More information:
- Policy Briefing for Kwale County Government: Delivering Water Security and Welfare – 22nd November, 2018.
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