Measuring water poverty based on SDG 6

Abstract

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 refers to ensuring access to water and sanitation for all. This study develops alternatives for calculating a water poverty measure based on SDG 6. We use ENEMDU, which is a quarterly labor market survey that only for March 2019 incorporates a Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) module. An innovative feature of this survey is that it includes information about water quality at the point of use as well as information about quality at the point of collection. Water poverty is assessed based on four dimensions: (i) safety, (ii) sanitation, (iii) hygiene, and (iv) quality. We use three different approaches to calculate our water poverty measures; the first is a deprivation approach, and the other two incorporate different weighting methods. The results indicate that our water poverty measures are highly correlated with each other (above 0.95); moreover, they are correlated with other poverty measures and social and health variables. People in water poverty are mostly racial minorities, have lower educational attainment, and are more likely to belong to the lower quintiles of income distribution This indicates that our water poverty measures are signs of poverty and deprivation in a broader sense.