Drawers of Water: Domestic Water Use in East Africa

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Clark University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Economic Geography.Several months ago, in discussing the problem of supplying water to the rural dweller, I made the following general comment: "The task of supplying water to urban communities, although posing many difficulties, was far simpler and more economical than providing the same commodity to rural dwellers. The same unit of expenditure in the first case usually covered a greater number of people than in the scattered villages or with more widely dispersed rural dwellers. The logistical approach, whether engineering, economic, or political, was essentially simpler. Yet, throughout the years, statesmen were uninterruptedly concerned with the depressed fate of the rural dweller, whose water supply needs were abysmally delayed in implementation, in comparison with his more favored urban brethreneven though these, in a large part of the world, still awaited safe and continuous supply."Although it is true that the rural dweller somehow always manages to get water, it is usually with effort and most of the time the commodity is meager in quantity and unsafe in quality. The global situation is well described in the 1972 Progress Report by the Director General of the World Health Organization to the Twenty-Fifth World Health Assembly. The 90 countries thus surveyed represented a 1970 population of 1,627 million. The rural picture was dismal, in that some 88 percent of its population of 1,026 million was inadequately served.The present volume, therefore, is particularly timely in the renewed interest in and desire to expand more rapidly the service of water in rural communities. The document approaches the problem quite differently from the more familiar mass attacks of previous workers in this field. The focus is primarily upon the habits, views, reactions, and acceptances of the local inhabitants, in order to determine with greater validity whether water systems, if provided, are of acceptable type and will actually be used.The apparent motivation for this inquiry lies in the fact that, even where systems have been provided on a relatively large scale, social and structural failures have been more frequent than desired. This has been the case, for example, in Thailand, Venezuela, and Argen-

A Global Agenda for Household Water Security: Measurement, Monitoring, and Management

“…To unpack water insecurity within households, new methods are being developed to track the uneven distribution of water insecurity based on age, gender, and other factors (Wutich et al 2017, Wutich 2020). The water diary, for example, is a classic method for tracking household and individual water use (White et al 1972) that has recently been updated and improved (Wutich 2009;Hoque and Hope 2018;Hoque and Hope 2019). It is an important source of data on water use per person per day where water meter data are not available, as in situations where households rely on multiple water sources or are not connected to a central water grid.…”

PROTOCOL: Water, sanitation and hygiene for reducing childhood mortality in low‐ and middle‐income countries

“…Reference lists of books, reports and meta‐evaluations to capture studies missed in electronic searches, particularly early studies, include: White et al (1972), Saunders and Warford (1976), Feachem et al (1978), Cairncross et al (1980), WHO (1983), Khan et al (1986), Briscoe et al (1986), Charmarbagwala et al (2004), White and Gunnarsson (2008) and Esteves Mills and Cumming (2016).…”

“…A sixth transmission route has since been identified, “fomites”—that is, objects acting as disease‐carrying vectors such as clothes, utensils, toys and furniture (Cairncross & Feachem, 2018). Implicit in the figure are three water‐related, faecal‐borne disease transmission routes: water‐borne diseases transmitted through ingesting infected water, water‐washed diseases transmitted through inadequate drinking water supply and hygiene (e.g., cholera, diarrhoeal disease, hepatitis, typhoid), and water‐based diseases transmitted by penetrating skin (e.g., schistosomiasis transmitted in water, and ascaris, hookworm and whipworm in contaminated soil) (White et al, 1972, p. 163).…”

“…The water indicator was later further defined as access to water from an improved source within 1 km of the household. This is roughly the time taken for a 30‐min round‐trip to collect water in the absence of queueing, which has been demonstrated as the time up to which basic needs for water supply can be reasonably met (Cairncross & Feachem, 2018; White et al, 1972). There are circumstances where it is likely that more than 30 min will be needed for 1 km roundtrips, such as mountainous or sandy terrain, or in water scarce regions where people may spend more time queuing at the water collection point than travelling to it (Dar & Khan, 2011).…”

“…Organisational website and repository hand searches include: the Impact Evaluation Repository of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), the Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, J-PAL evaluations, Innovations for Poverty Action, CEGA water and sanitation research projects, DFID Research for Development, IMPROVE International, IRC (WASH), 15 Oxfam, UNICEF, US Agency for International Development, WaterAid, and the World Bank Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) and IEG. Finally, the bibliographies of all included systematic reviews were checked to identify additional primary studies and systematic reviews.Reference lists of books, reports and meta-evaluations to capture studies missed in electronic searches, particularly early studies, include:White et al (1972),Saunders and Warford (1976), Feachem et al (1978),Cairncross et al (1980),WHO (1983),Khan et al (1986),Briscoe et al (1986),Charmarbagwala et al (2004),White and Gunnarsson (2008) and EstevesMills and Cumming (2016).…”