Assessment of the water supply
unreliability’s costs
Before looking into detail at the costs of water supply
unreliability, let us briefly mention a few resultsrelated to the level of unreliability and the importance
of households’ compensatory strategies. On an average
households surveyed are getting 13 hours of supply,
but around 13% do not get water at all, while
around 40% have water round the clock. An unreliability
indicator was built taking into account the
pressure level and the number of hours of supply. Its
use proved to be relevant as it shows that if 40% of
households get water round the clock, only 5% have
a service that can be compared to developed countries.
It brings out clearly the importance of pressure
to define the quality of service as far as water supply
is concerned. As far as households’ compensatory
strategies are concerned, they are numerous and very
diverse and on an average each household uses more
than two of them. The most important ones are the
storing strategies (in buckets or in tanks), the pumping
strategies (tubewells and handpumps), the rescheduling
of activities and the treatment of water.