Almost half of the world's population is expected to experience water stress in their daily lives by 2050. The impacts of water scarcity on physical and psychosocial health are especially felt in arid regions of Ethiopia where semi-nomadic pastoralist populations are heavily reliant on groundwater for domestic and livestock needs. However, functional water supply infrastructure and reliable service delivery remain a challenge. A cross-sectional water security household survey of 469 heads of households and borehole runtime sensor data in Afar Region, Ethiopia, has three main findings. First, higher levels of household water insecurity experiences (HWISE) and water-related emotional distress (WRED) are positively correlated (0.57, p<0.01) and are significantly associated with "limited" water service levels, the non-use of boreholes, and more vulnerable household demographics (female-headed households and lower household incomes). Lower HWISE scores are associated with increased borehole pump usage and reliability, with a cut-off point of 6 h of pump usage per day measured with electronic sensors. Adding additional water points to the dry lowlands of Afar have led to overcrowding and rangeland degradation in the past, highlighting a need to balance increased production for human consumption with livestock use. When it comes to climate resilience and adaptation, ensuring the reliability of what has already been constructed is a top priority for the regional government. Our findings suggest that increasing the reliability and daily usage of existing water supply systems over the short-sighted expansion of sources is worth the investment in services it will take to reach even the most far-flung communities.

Water stress is increasingly affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world. In East Africa, severe and persistent drought periods negatively impact health and livelihoods. Drought increases reliance on mechanized boreholes to extract groundwater. However, without adequate resource allocations, effective monitoring of borehole functionality, and reliable maintenance service, breakdown rates increase and downtimes last many months. Our study applies system dynamics modeling to investigate the effects of allocating resources to borehole maintenance and repair in the Afar Region in Ethiopia and Turkana County in Kenya. We inform model calibration with runtime and functionality estimates derived from sensors installed on 245 boreholes and apply sensitivity analyses varying budget allocations to optimize for functionality. We conclude that increasing the borehole repair and maintenance budgets in Turkana from the current 30% to 85% of available budgets could result in an additional 83 working boreholes and 95% functionality in 2030. In Afar, increasing maintenance budgets from 38% to 79% could result in functionality levels of 75% by 2030, well above currently projected levels of 54%.

The prevalence of drought in the Horn of Africa has continued to threaten access to safe and affordable water for millions of people. In order to improve monitoring of water pump functionality, telemetry-connected sensors have been installed on 480 electrical groundwater pumps in arid regions of Kenya and Ethiopia, designed to improve monitoring and support operation and maintenance of these water supplies. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of two classification systems designed to identify the functionality and non-functionality of these electrical pumps, one an expert-informed conditional classifier and the other leveraging machine learning. Given a known relationship between surface water availability and groundwater pump use, the classifiers combine in-situ sensor data with remote sensing indicators for rainfall and surface water. Our validation indicates a overall pump status sensitivity (true positive rate) of 82% for the expert classifier and 84% for the machine learner. When the pump is being used, both classifiers have a 100% true positive rate performance. When a pump is not being used, the specificity (true negative rate) is about 50% for the expert classifier and over 65% for the machine learner. If these detection capabilities were integrated into a repair service, the typical uptime of pumps during drought periods in this region could potentially, if budget resources and institutional incentives for pump repairs were provided, result in a drought-period uptime improvement from 60% to nearly of 85% - a 40% reduction in the relative risk of pump downtime.

Universal access to safe drinking water will require an investment of over $140 billion in capital expenditures to meet the targets set by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The World Bank estimates that recurring operations and maintenance costs for basic water and sanitation (WASH) services will rise from about $4 billion to over $30 billion per year by 2030, significantly outweighing capital costs for basic WASH services. Yet, available funding from regional, national and international sources regularly prioritizes capital investment in new water infrastructure, leading to significant unfunded operation and maintenance mandates for service providers operating in low-income settings where consumer payments cannot practically cover operating costs. Capital maintenance is deferred, leading to poor utility financial performance and decreased service for water customers. In this paper, we present indicative funding models, valuation of existing assets, and expenditures of four medium-sized urban water utilities in low, middle, and high-income communities representing a broad range of operating contexts. Yet we find common operating challenges. None of the four utilities are spending enough on capital maintenance to sustain service levels, and we find that the gap between the life cycle costs of water service delivery and associated revenues of water services ranges from $1 to $17 per customer each year. Discounting life cycle costs by service and coverage levels further widens the funding gap. All utilities would need additional funding to reach universal access with full coverage of life cycle costs, ranging from 6% of budgets to nearly 8 times current funding levels. This would not be economically or politically feasible through tariffs alone, which are already currently subsidized in all contexts. The contribution of progressive tax monies to subsidize services is taken for granted in high-income contexts and unavailable in poorer ones that must rely on insufficient and irregular foreign aid or national budget allocations in strained economies. These findings contrast with a commonly shared view in the global development sector that local or at minimum regional financial sustainability of water supplies is achievable. Consequently, our findings suggest that national governments and international donors should acknowledge that long term support of local water service delivery is both necessary, appropriate, and likely more cost-effective than current funding models. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.