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More than 500 million rural Africans lack safe drinking water. The human right to water and United Nations Sustainable Development Goal SDG6.1 promote a policy shift from building water infrastructure to sustaining water services. However, the financial calculus is bleak with the costs of "safely managed"' or "basic" water services in rural Africa beyond current government budgets and donor funds. The funding shortfall is compounded by the disappointing results of earlier policy initiatives in Africa. This is partly because of a failure to understand which attributes of water services rural people value. We model more than 11,000 choice observations in rural Kenya by attributes of drinking water quality, price, reliability, and proximity. Aggregate analysis disguises alternative user priorities in three choice classes. The two larger choice classes tolerate lower service levels with higher payments. A higher water service level reflects the smallest choice class favored by women and the lower wealth group. For the lower wealth group, slower repair times are accepted in preference to a lower payment. Some people discount potable water and proximity, and most people choose faster repair times and lower payments. We argue policy progress needs to chart common ground between individual choices and universal rights. Guaranteeing repair times may provide a policy lever to unlock individual payments to complement public investment in water quality and waterpoint proximity to support progressive realization of a universal right., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest., (Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.)

This study examines the relationship between rainfall and groundwater use in rural Kenya, using automatically-transmitted hourly data from handpumps (n = 266), daily rainfall records (n = 19), and household survey data (n = 2508). We demonstrate a 34% reduction in groundwater use during the wet season compared to the dry season, suggesting a large shift from improved to unimproved sources in the wet season. By cross-correlating handpump and rainfall time series, we also reveal substantial short-term changes in groundwater pumping observed immediately following heavy rainfall. Further investigation and modelling of this response reveals a 68% reduction in pump use on the day immediately following heavy rain. We then investigate reasons for this behavioural response to rainfall, using survey data to examine the characteristics, concerns and behaviours of households in the area where the reduction in pump use was most marked. In this area rainwater harvesting was widespread and only 6% of households reported handpumps as their sole source of drinking water in the wet season, compared to 86% in the dry season. These findings shed light on the impact increasing rainfall variability may have on the Sustainable Development Goal of "universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all". Specifically, we suggest a flaw in the water policy assumption that the provision of improved sources of drinking water-in this case community handpumps-translates to consistent use and the associated health benefits. We note that failure to understand and account for actual water use behaviour may results in adverse public health outcomes and maladapted WASH policy and interventions., (Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Africa lags behind the world on operational and financial progress to maintain safe drinking water services. In rural Mali, we explore the implications of monthly flat fee contributions and volumetric (pay-as-you-fetch) payments for water use and revenue generation. By assessing 4413 months of data across 177 handpumps, we find that once payment modalities switch from volumetric payments to monthly flat fees, a waterpoint registers a more than three-times higher monthly revenue. While flat fees cover a higher share of the operational costs of providing reliable water services, a subsidy gap persists. Flat fees appear to stimulate daily water use which more than doubles compared to volumetric payments. We estimate that a 1 °C increase in average monthly temperature is associated with 180 more litres of water used every day per handpump, emphasising the importance of climate-resilient water supplies. Based on these insights, we discuss the role of professional service delivery models to support reliable drinking water services for rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-based financing of rural water supply operation and maintenance is a well-established policy principle in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet evidence from over 90,000 waterpoints in five sub-Saharan African countries suggests a majority of communities fail to establish and sustain a revenue collection system. As a result, insufficient finances to repair waterpoints can lead to lengthy downtimes or abandonment, threatening the health and welfare of millions of water users forced to revert to unsafe or distant alternatives. Applying a social-ecological systems framework to community waterpoints in rural Kenya, we empirically assess the prevalence and determinants of financial contributions among water users. The analysis draws on multi-decadal data covering 229 years' worth of water committee financial records consisting of more than 53,000 household payments. Results reveal that non-payment and late payment are prevalent, and payment behaviours are predicted by groundwater quality, waterpoint location, productive water use, and rainfall season. The findings reflect the socio-ecological nature of waterpoint sustainability in rural sub-Saharan Africa and confirm that households are not always willing and able to pay for an improved water supply. This situation is symptomatic of a fundamental operation and maintenance financing challenge that must be addressed if the Sustainable Development Goal of universal access to safe water is to be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Up to 9 million unregulated tubewells were privately installed in Bangladesh since 2006. • Rural households experienced a threefold decline in real costs of tubewells since 1982. • Households' financed MDG advances towards improved rural drinking water access. • Unmonitored self-supply is risky but new preferences create opportunities for regulated services. • Achieving SDG 6.1 implies transition from provision of access to risk-management models. The drinking water sector is off track to reach Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.1 with over a quarter of the world's population lacking safe and reliable services. Policy approaches are shifting away from provision of access towards managing the multiple risks of water supply and quality. By considering how infrastructure, information, and institutional systems evolved in Bangladesh, this article identifies the unintentional consequences of reallocating management responsibility for rural water services away from government agencies towards individuals and households. Between 2012 and 2017, we estimate up to forty-five unregulated tubewells were installed privately for every publicly funded rural waterpoint. This growth rate more than doubled total national waterpoint infrastructure since 2006. The scale of growth is reflected in the declining ratio of households per tubewell from over fifty-seven in 1982 to less than two in 2017, potentially approaching market saturation. This scale of growth aligns to an observed decrease in the real price of private market shallow tubewells by seventy percent between 1982 and 2017. In 2018, we estimate households invested up to USD253 million in tubewells, nearly sixty-five percent of the total national water and sanitation sector's household-level finance. In effect, household investments became critical to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of improved infrastructure access, but now pose challenges for meeting targets of safely managed services. The scale of continued private investment provides an opportunity for policymakers to explore blended public finance models to meet emerging consumer preferences, while at the same time introducing regulatory and monitoring systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We explore how upgrading water supply infrastructure influences user behaviour in rural Mali. • We model changes in revenue and volumetric water use when handpumps are upgraded to solar kiosks. • Average monthly revenue is four times higher with solar kiosks, volumetric use does not change. • Hot and dry periods result in expected higher volumetric use. • Payment collections increased and remained stable after upgrading handpumps to solar kiosks. Providing a sustainable supply of safe drinking water in rural Africa depends on sufficient revenue from user payments to maintain services. While handpumps have been the primary source of drinking water for rural Africans for decades, local revenue generation has been unstable, contributing to service disruptions and welfare losses. We examine the effect of upgrading manual handpumps to solar kiosks in rural Mali from 2019 to 2023. We model 452 monthly records of observed payments and metered water usage to estimate changes in volumetric use and revenue generation. Average revenues increase four-fold indicating stronger financial performance with solar kiosks. In contrast, we find no significant increase in the volume of water people use when a handpump is upgraded to a solar kiosk. We estimate that a 1 °C temperature increase is associated with a $9 increase in average monthly revenue and 366 more litres of water used every day per waterpoint. Our study suggests that rural Malians are more inclined to pay for water from professionally managed solar kiosks. However, seasonal volatility in water demand and uncertainty in the long-term revenue effect suggests caution in assuming solar kiosks are a definitive solution to the nuanced and dynamic nature of water user behaviours in rural Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An improved understanding of failure risks for water supplies in rural sub-Saharan Africa will be critical to achieving the global goal of safe water for all by 2030. In the absence of longitudinal biophysical and operational data, investigations into water point failure risk factors have to date been limited to cross-sectional research designs. This retrospective cohort study applies survival analysis to identify factors that predict failure risks for handpumps installed on boreholes along the south coast of Kenya from the 1980s. The analysis is based on a unique dataset linking attributes of > 300 water points at the time of installation with their operational lifespan over the following decades. Cox proportional hazards and accelerated failure time models suggest water point failure risks are higher and lifespans are shorter when water supplied is more saline, static water level is deeper, and groundwater is pumped from an unconsolidated sand aquifer. The risk of failure also appears to grow as distance to spare part suppliers increases. To bolster the sustainability of rural water services and ensure no community is left behind, post-construction support mechanisms will need to mitigate heterogeneous environmental and geographical challenges. Further studies are needed to better understand the causal pathways that underlie these risk factors in order to inform policies and practices that ensure water services are sustained even where unfavourable conditions prevail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]