Progress in improving the quality and quantity of water used by people in rural areas of the developing world has been unsatisfactory in two respects: (1) supplies that have been built are frequently neither used correctly nor properly maintained and (2) extension of improved service to unserved populations has been slow. Though this poor record is not the result of a single factor, a major impediment to improved performance is inadequate information on the response of consumers to new service options. The behavioral assumptions that typically underlie most rural water supply planning efforts are simple. It is commonly assumed that so long as financial requirements do not exceed 5% of income, rural consumers will choose to abandon their existing water supply in favor of the "improved" system. Several reviews by the World Bank, bilateral donors, and water supply agencies in developing countries have shown, however, that this simple model of behavioral response to improved water supplies has usually proved incorrect.1 In rural areas many of those "served" by new systems have chosen to continue with their traditional water use practices.
This study presents a discrete choice model of households' water source choice decisions in developing countries. This model is estimated with data collected by in‐depth personal interviews with 69 households in Ukunda, Kenya, a small town south of Mombasa. The results suggest that households' source choice decisions are influenced by the time it takes to collect water from different sources, the price of water, and the number of women in a household. Household income, however, did not have a statistically significant effect. Essentially the same data were used to estimate a traditional water demand model which attempts to explain the quantity of water demanded by a household as a function of collection time, income, and other socioeconomic variables. The results of the discrete choice and traditional water demand models are compared in this paper.
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