Journal
JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING-ASCE
Volume 136, Issue 11, Pages 1287-1298Publisher
ASCE-AMER SOC CIVIL ENGINEERS
DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)EE.1943-7870.0000255
Keywords
Aggregates; Water management; Water shortage; Water allocation policy; Africa
Funding
- UNICEF (Kenya Regional Office)
- Rural Focus Ltd.
- Agencia Catalana de Cooperacio al Desenvolupament (Generalitat de Catalunya)
- Centre de Cooperacio per al Desenvolupament (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)
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The Water Poverty Index (WPI) was created as an interdisciplinary indicator to assess water stress and scarcity, linking physical estimates of water availability with the socioeconomic drivers of poverty. This index has found great relevance in policy making as an effective water management tool, particularly in resources allocation and prioritization processes. Two conceptual weaknesses exist in the current index: (1) inadequate technique to combine available data and (2) poor statistical properties of the resulting composite. The purpose of this paper is to propose a suitable methodology to assess water poverty that overcomes these weaknesses. To this end, a number of combinations to create the WPI have been considered, based on indicators selection criteria, simple aggregation functions and multivariate analysis. The approach adopted has been designed for universal application at local scale. To exemplify the utilization of each alternative method, they have been piloted and implemented in the Turkana District (Kenya) as a case study. The paper concludes that the weighted multiplicative function is the most appropriate aggregation method for estimation of water poverty. It is least eclipsing and ambiguous free function, and it does not allow compensability among different variables of the index.
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