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Reliable water service delivery continues to be a complex global issue that is particularly challenging in rural communities. Despite billions of dollars of infrastructure interventions, sustainable water services remain out of reach for millions of people. Professionalized maintenance services have emerged as a service provision strategy to supplement the community-based rural water management approach. This study applies system dynamics modeling to assess the potential impact of scaling up professionalized maintenance services on piped water systems in Kitui County, Kenya. The study results show that over a 10 year simulation, calibrated with 21 months of empirical data and based on a range of key assumptions, delivery of professionalized maintenance services across the county may increase countywide functionality rates from 54% to over 83%, leading to a 67% increase in water production. Furthermore, the increase in preventive maintenance activities and proactive repairs can lead to less frequent major breakdowns and reduction in county government spending on major repairs by over 60%. However, current service fee income from communities accounts for 8% of the total cost of service, necessitating substantial sustained external financing or government subsidies to be financially viable at scale.

Viable pathways to universal safely managed drinking water access in rural Africa involve a blend of infrastructure types, service delivery arrangements, and sources of finance. Priorities are shaped by institutional and economic barriers and are often based on assumptions regarding user demand and revenue sustainability. Improved understanding of how alternative approaches affect revenue generated from user payments can enhance long-term viability and repayment capacity of rural piped water services. We analyse more than 3,900 monthly records from operators in Ghana, Rwanda, and Uganda and model revenue patterns for novel service area archetypes. Results indicate on and off premises connections exhibit complementary revenue patterns, with volumetric revenue determined by tariff level rather than connection type and waterpoints with the greatest dispensing capacity generating the most aggregate revenue. The prepaid credit payment approach, which is increasingly promoted to enhance revenue collection efficiency, is not associated with revenue advantages compared to pay-as-you-fetch and monthly billing approaches when tariff level is controlled. These patterns are recurrent at multi- and single country scales and across service areas where public and enterprise-led investment approaches to infrastructure development are taken, suggesting the findings may be applicable beyond the study domain. Infrastructure investment strategies can promote revenue and equity goals through off-site piped water, but more evidence is needed to understand the trade-offs of prepaid credit systems.

The devolution of governance to county level in Kenya provides a window for innovation in water policy and practice, critical to improving water security in rural areas where almost half of households lack basic water services. In rural Kitui County, Kenya, a number of projects supported by different funders have served as policy experiments over the past 10 years. We apply an action-oriented knowledge framework to explore the kinds of knowledge that have been produced in the course of these interventions and reflect on what kinds of knowledge are contributing to institutional change and how they are contributing to sustainability in the rural water sector. Actionable recommendations for the further development of county-level water policy include: First, ensure local ownership of the policy-making process whilst enabling appropriate technical and legal support; second, take long timeframes of institutional change into account in donor programming; third, establish water, sanitation and hygiene forums bringing diverse actors within the sector together to build cohesion, facilitate knowledge exchange, enable collaborative learning, and deliver collective action.

Climate change and future abstraction regimes will influence the availability of groundwater resources. To alleviate any potential negative effects on aquifer systems and dependent industrial and human uses, it is important to develop long-term water management plans. This study evaluates the effect of climate change and future increased groundwater demand from a coastal aquifer located in Kwale County in southern Kenya. A previously calibrated numerical groundwater flow model has been used as an assessment tool to study how future climate (precipitation and temperature variation) and groundwater abstraction changes will affect the aquifer system. The groundwater flow model was built to simulate the period 2010 to 2017, and eight future model scenarios were developed that cover six hypothetical future years. Future groundwater abstraction has been based on current allocations and future estimates made by Kenya’s Water Resources Authority. Future rainfall scenarios have been constructed based on a long historical data series (from 1959 to 2017) and the Standard Precipitation Index. The main results show that future abstraction increases due to economic growth exerts a minimum impact compared with expected climate variability. Recharge depends on intense rain events with important implications for both dry periods and for an average rainfall year. A succession of extended dry seasons may affect all water users. However, the groundwater level decline in the local shallow aquifer can reach five meters, with important consequences for local community water supplies. The most significant groundwater decline in drought periods is observed in the area surrounding the pumping wellfields in the deep aquifers, where the effects of drought and significant abstraction are multiplied. However, the effect of increased abstraction on the shallow aquifer system is limited. Despite groundwater level decline observed during prolonged dry periods, a dry period followed by a humid perio, The authors gratefully acknowledge the collaboration and key data shared by Base Titanium Ltd., and the support of Kenya's Water Resources Authority, the Kwale Country Government, Kwale International Sugar Company Ltd., and Rural Focus Ltd. This research was funded by the UK Government via NERC, ESRC and DFID as part of the Gro for GooD project (UPGro Consortium Grant: NE/M008894/1)., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (author's final draft)

Rural Africa lags behind global progress to provide safe drinking water to everyone. Decades of effort and billions of dollars of investment have yielded modest gains, with high but avoidable health and economic costs borne by over 300m people lacking basic water access. We explore why rural water is different for communities, schools, and healthcare facilities across characteristics of scale, institutions, demand, and finance. The findings conclude with policy recommendations to (i) network rural services at scale, (ii) unlock rural payments by creating value, and (iii) design and test performance-based funding models at national and regional scales, with an ambition to eliminate the need for future, sustainable development goals.

The links between groundwater and welfare are highly contested, unclear and confounded by political, environmental and economic factors. The lack of understanding of these links has wider implication on policies and strategies aimed at accelerating the sustainable development goals of safely-managed drinking water services and eradicating poverty. This study provides empirical evidence of the existing links between groundwater and poverty using welfare metrics versus productive uses of water, groundwater table depth, drinking water services and groundwater dependency with data obtained from a household socio-economic survey (n = 3349), a water audit of water infrastructure (n = 570) and volumetric usage from water data transmitters (n = 300). Results show that the bottom welfare households are characterized by greater dependency on shallow groundwater, less acceptable drinking water services by taste, reliability, affordability or accessibility but not quantity. Productive use of groundwater for livestock accrues to the middle welfare quintiles with the bottom and top welfare quintiles by choice or exclusion having little engagement. Groundwater productive uses, services and characteristics explain at least 17% of the variation in a households' welfare with productive uses particularly benefiting female headed households. These findings suggest that ancillary investments to improve affordability and reliability of rural water services will be needed to enhance welfare of the poor who depend on groundwater systems. Further, such knowledge of the relationships between water and welfare can support the formulation of policies and strategies aimed at poverty reduction, inclusive growth and access to safe water for all.

Welfare transitions are weakly understood in sub-Saharan Africa due to limited panel data to analyze trajectories of household escaping from, falling into, or remaining out of deprivation. We model data from 3500 households in coastal Kenya in three panels from 2014 to 2016 to evaluate determinants of welfare by multidimensional and subjective measures. Findings indicate that more than half of the households are deprived, with female-headed households being the most vulnerable and making the least progress. The subjective welfare measure identified three times more chronically poor households than the multidimensional metric (27% vs. 9%); in contrast, the multidimensional metric estimated twice as many 'never poor' households than the subjective measure (39% vs. 16%). The 'churning poor' were broadly consistent for both measures at roughly half the sample. Four welfare priorities converged from modelling welfare transitions. Broadening access to secondary education and energy services, improving the reliability and proximity of drinking water services, and ending open defecation improve welfare outcomes. While the policy implications do not align neatly with Kenya's national and county government mandates, we argue that prioritising fewer but targeted sustainable development goals may improve accountability, feasibility, and responsibility in delivery if informed by local priorities and political salience.

The industrialization process taking place in Africa has led to an overall increase in groundwater abstraction in most countries in the continent. However, the lack of hydrogeological data, as in many developing countries, makes it difficult to properly manage groundwater systems. This study presents a real case study in which a combination of different hydrogeological tools together with different sources of information allow the assessment of how increased competition for water may be affecting groundwater systems by analysing the sustainability of new abstraction regimes under different real climatic condition (before, during and after La Niña 2016). The area where this approach has been applied is Kwale County (in Coastal Kenya) in a hydrogeological context representative of an important part of the east coast of the continent, where new mining and agriculture activities co-exist with tourism and local communities. The results show that the lack of aquifer systems data can be overcome, at least partly, by integrating different sources of information. Most of the time, water-reliant users collect specific hydrogeological information that can contribute to defining the overall hydrogeological system, since their own main purpose is to exploit the aquifer with the maximum productivity. Therefore, local community water usage, together with different stakeholder's knowledge and good corporate water management act as a catalyst for providing critical data, and allows the generation of credible models for future groundwater management and resource allocation. Furthermore, complementary but simple information sources such as in situ interviews, Google Earth, Trip Advisor and easy-to use analytical methods that can be applied in the African context as in many developing countries, and enables groundwater abstraction to be estimated and the sustainability of the aquifer system to be defined, allowing potential future risks to be assessed., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)

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.

Mike Edmunds was a pioneer in modern applied hydrogeochemistry, helping to develop geochemical tools and their application to managing water resources. In a career span- ning almost 50 years, Mike made major contributions to water resource science as well as pro moting the role of chemistry in solving groundwater problems and championing the need to incorporate science into policy. There can be few hydrogeologists who travelled so extensively in order to study the vast range of groundwater environments of the world. Mike ’ s contribution to water scie nce was recognised through the many accolades he received including the Whitaker Medal in 1999, the O.E. Meinzer Award in 2009, and the Vernadsky Medal in 2010.

Global progress towards the goal of universal, safely managed drinking water services will be shaped by the dynamic relationship between water risks, values and institutions. We apply Mary Douglas’ cultural theory to rural waterpoint management and discuss its operationalisation in pluralist arrangements through networking different management cultures at scale. The theory is tested in coastal Kenya, an area that typifies the challenges faced across Africa in providing rural communities with safely managed water. Drawing on findings from a longitudinal study of 3500 households, we examine how different management cultures face and manage operational, financial, institutional and environmental risks. This paper makes the case for cooperative solutions across systems where current policy effectively separates communities from the state or markets. The contribution of this research is both a theoretical and empirical case to consider pluralist institutional arrangements that enable risks and responsibilities to be re-conceptualised and re-allocated between the state, market and communities to create value for rural water users.

Locally managed handpumps provide water services to around 200. million people in rural Africa. Handpump failures often result in extended service disruption leading to high but avoidable financial, health, and development costs. Using unique observational data from monitoring handpump usage in rural Kenya, we evaluate how dramatic improvements in maintenance services influence payment preferences across institutional, operational, and geographic factors. Public goods theory is applied to examine new institutional forms of handpump management. Results reveal steps to enhance rural water supply sustainability by pooling maintenance and financial risks at scale supported by advances in monitoring and payment technologies.

In response to the disappointing results of many regulatory or public investment approaches to watershed management, payments for environmental services has emerged as a new mechanism to maintain socially optimal environmental services by compensating people for the services they provide. However, without adequate understanding of stakeholders' willingness to modify or maintain land use or water resource decisions, market-based mechanisms may prove to be unsustainable, with uncertain social and environmental outcomes. Negotiating resource use patterns is a process that requires an understanding of the type, level and duration of incentives for stakeholders to co-operate meaningfully. In this paper, we describe a negotiation support framework that has been developed from the literature and field experiences in Costa Rica and India. The framework then serves to critically examine a case study from each country to draw empirical lessons from the process of watershed management.