Household water use, poverty and seasonality: Wealth effects, labour constraints, and minimal consumption in Ethiopia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wrr.2014.04.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Water use declines in the dry season, as collection times increase.

  • Water use for hygiene is often sacrificed when collection times increase.

  • Poor households use consistently less water than the better-off, due partly to labour shortages.

  • In the dry season poor households use dangerously low levels of water for hygiene.

  • Poor agropastoral households also struggle to provide enough water for livestock in the dry season.

Abstract

Data from a highland to lowland transect in the Oromia Region of eastern Ethiopia show that household water use is minimal, regardless of presence of improved sources, and variations in use are driven by interactions of poverty and rainfall variability. In the dry season, when many sources fail, use for hygiene drops perilously, particularly among poor households, as collection times rise and coincide with high demands for wage labour. Providing sufficient water for livestock is also a struggle for poor agropastoral households. Poorer households use less water because they have less labour for water collection and fewer storage and transport assets. Labour shortages also make nearer, unsafe sources preferable to more distant protected schemes. The health and livelihood benefits of improved water access depend on continuous use of sufficient safe water, by all, but we have limited knowledge of actual water use patterns. This paper aims to help address this gap, and documents intra-community inequities and seasonal variations in water access. These are not captured in coverage statistics, but are likely to occur wherever pronounced climate variability, inadequate infrastructure and severe poverty coincide.

Section snippets

1. Introduction

In much of rural Africa, little is known about actual patterns of water availability, access and use. Ethiopia is no exception. Both national statistics and data from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme indicate that water coverage is improving, though datasets vary considerably due to their different estimation methods

2. Methodology

Data were collected using a modified HEA approach, adapted to include water, termed Water Economy for Livelihoods (WELS). This is described in full in Coulter et al. [17]. WELS was developed to bring analytical rigour to understanding the linkages between water and food security and is designed to build on the HEA approach and analytical framework which has already gained credibility in Ethiopia and other countries. The premise behind both WELS and HEA is that an understanding of how people

3.1. Water sources, collection times and water quality

In the highland WBP Livelihood Zone there are many springs, most of which (85%) are unprotected (lacking the addition of structures to protect the catchment and spring head from contamination). Households use these for all domestic uses and watering livestock (Fig. 2). Livestock watering also takes place at small seasonal streams. In SMC Livelihood Zone, springs are also common and provide the major source of domestic water, but are much more widely scattered and interspersed with other

4. Conclusions

Household water use in this part of Ethiopia is very low, in many cases not much above the minimum thresholds associated with humanitarian emergencies. Volumes used for hygiene are particularly small, falling to as little as 0.5 lpcd in the dry season in some cases. While the use of water for drinking and cooking is inelastic, even when waiting times increase in the dry season (at least within the limits of collection times in a normal year), water use for hygiene declines sharply in the dry

Acknowledgements

This paper is published with the permission of the Executive Director of the British Geological Survey (NERC). The research was funded in part by a grant from the UK Department for International Development (DFID). Groundwater resilience to climate change in Africa. The opinions expressed in the paper are not necessarily those of DFID.

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