The Water Poverty Index in rural Cambodia and Viet Nam: A holistic snapshot to improve water management planning

Abstract

For developing countries, adequate domestic water supply is conventionally assessed at international and national levels as the proportion of households that are "covered" by improved water sources. However, this measure has been acknowledged to be insufficient to account for the complex factors, including socio-economic, governance and environmental issues that can limit water use and access in developing countries. Because of this, there is concern that safe water access and use is not being measured accurately, leading to a poor understanding of domestic water and poor water planning and management choices. The Water Poverty Index (WPI) is a holistic tool that aims to address some of these wider issues. The WPI comprises five components that together provide a snapshot of how water poor a household is. This research undertakes concurrent conventional and WPI assessments of domestic water in five rural villages across Cambodia and Viet Nam. It is concluded that conventional measures had a relatively limited connection to how water was used by many respondents and that in the study villages, conventional measures did not predictably determine whether adequate quantities of safe water were used by individual households. It is argued that local, holistic water assessments at selected sites may support and triangulate conventional measurements of domestic water and improve water management planning and policy in rural developing areas.

The use of principal component analysis for the construction of the Water Poverty Index

“…The WPI aims to correlate water with poverty through various indicators, such as water for sanitation, hygiene, and health, as well as the generation of jobs, equality among social classes, and the rights of lower social classes' access to water (RIJSBERMAN, 2003). In multiple studies, the WPI has been used to evaluate water scarcity, in which most of them used the index to identify a specific set of indicators for different locations (GINE;LAWRENCE;SULLIVAN, 2002;LISA, 2014;MANANDHAR;PANDEY;KAZAMA, 2012;ZHANG et al, 2015). Thanks to these studies, it has led to the awareness that questions regarding water scarcity and indicators to represent them are location specific.…”

Application of a DPSIR Modeling Framework to Assess Spatial–Temporal Differences of Water Poverty in China

“…Secondly, uncertainty about weight definition among variables can lead to inaccuracy and inefficient explanations (Wenxin et al 2018). Thirdly, the existing research (Komnenic et al 2009;Sujata et al 2012;Vishnu et al 2012;Wilk and Jonsson 2013;Guppy 2014) focused on specific time; however, it ignored the continuity in time. This may lead to the lack of explanatory power if indicators do not sufficiently reflect the subjective and objective relative importance variable (Wenxin et al 2018).…”

“…This may lead to the lack of explanatory power if indicators do not sufficiently reflect the subjective and objective relative importance variable (Wenxin et al 2018). Thirdly, the existing research (Komnenic et al 2009;Sujata et al 2012;Vishnu et al 2012;Wilk and Jonsson 2013;Guppy 2014) focused on specific time; however, it ignored the continuity in time. The continuity will help to find the mechanism of temporal change in wp, which could help decision makers identify priority issues to target with decision-making.…”

Synergetic Relationship between Urban and Rural Water Poverty: Evidence from Northwest China

“…Using this framework can provide a theoretical basis for integrated water resources management, and through integrated management, achieve the goal of human-water harmonious coexistence [11]. So far, the WPI has evaluated the water resources situation at multiple scales, including the urban [12,13], rural [14,15], basin [16,17,18], national [19], province [11,20], county [4], town [13], and community [21,22] scale, mainly related to water availability, accessibility, quality, environmental impact, and social and economic factors [10,23]. Although scholars agree on the advantages of the WPI [22,24], there are some weaknesses that must be addressed.…”