Rapid technical assessment and troubleshooting of rural water supply systems

Providing the rural poor with safe drinking water has been a national priority for the South African government since 1994, in line with the internationally embraced millennium development goals. After more than a decade of sustained and significant investment, it is time to address the sustained efficiency of the multitude of rural water supply systems that had been built. This paper reports on a proposed framework for allowing the rapid assessment of such a small rural water supply system. The framework hinges upon four criteria, namely the availability of a water source in terms of quality as well as quantity; the capacity to distribute the water from the source to the consumer in terms of pump, pipeline and tank sizes; the continuity of the system over time as a measure of distribution reliability; and the condition of the system in terms of diligent maintenance and repair. For each of these criteria, practical indicators had to be identified which can be quantified during a short site visit, requiring a minimum of prior knowledge. With numerical estimates for each of the indicators, the indicators can then be appropriately weighted and combined into a single index for each of the criteria. This paper provides the details of how the index for condition was calculated. The proposed methodology was applied to fifteen small villages in rural Venda to demonstrate its utility. Not only could the systems be rapidly ranked in terms of their relative performance, but the reasons for their non-performance, where applicable, could be pinpointed. Where availability was a problem, the problem was predominantly the drying up of boreholes, with unacceptable water quality encountered in two cases - these defects can only be corrected with substantial engineering input and investment. Capacity was not a serious problem, except for insufficient storage in some cases. The largest problem was the lack of continuity caused by poor operation, arguments about the payment of fuel, and unacceptable repair times for broken equipment - problems that should be easy to correct through better management practices. The condition of the systems, all relatively new, was still good although the taps were generally in poor condition, caused by a combination of installing taps of poor quality in the first place, and a lack of scheduled replacement and rehabilitation. Overall, the proposed methodology offers great promise as a simple, rapid benchmarking tool for water supply authorities responsible for rural water supply systems. Copyright ASCE 2009