The challenge of global water access monitoring: evaluating straight-line distance versus self-reported travel time among rural households in Mozambique
Abstract
Support is growing for the incorporation of fetching time and/or distance considerations in the definition of access to improved water supply used for global monitoring. Current efforts typically rely on self-reported distance and/or travel time data that have been shown to be unreliable. To date, however, there has been no head-to-head comparison of such indicators with other possible distance/time metrics. This study provides such a comparison. We examine the association between both straight-line distance and self-reported one-way travel time with measured route distances to water sources for 1,103 households in Nampula province, Mozambique. We find straight-line, or Euclidean, distance to be a good proxy for route distance (R(2) = 0.98), while self-reported travel time is a poor proxy (R(2) = 0.12). We also apply a variety of time- and distance-based indicators proposed in the literature to our sample data, finding that the share of households classified as having versus lacking access would differ by more than 70 percentage points depending on the particular indicator employed. This work highlights the importance of the ongoing debate regarding valid, reliable, and feasible strategies for monitoring progress in the provision of improved water supply services.
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Ho et al. (2014) found that self-reported one-way water collecting time in rural Mozambique was poorly correlated with time estimates based on route distance.
“The researchers found that self-reported data were poorly correlated with route distance”
From An Analysis of Water Collection Labor among Women and Children in 24 Sub-Saharan African Countries (2016) · cites this paper as [23]
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An Analysis of Water Collection Labor among Women and Children in 24 Sub-Saharan African Countries
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“(2014) compared self-reported one-way water collecting time in rural Mozambique against time estimates based on the route distance [23].”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialPáez, A., Anjum, Z., Dickson-Anderson, S. E., Schuster-Wallace, C. J., Martín Ramos, B., & Higgins, C. D. (2020) · Journal of Transport Geography · doi:10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2019.102564 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
- Authors
- Ho, J. C., Russel, K. C., & Davis, J.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Davis, Jennifer
- Venue
- Journal of Water and Health
- Publisher
- IWA Publishing
- Published
- 2013-09-24
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 173-183
- ISSN
- 1477-8920 (ISSN-L)
- 1996-7829
- OpenAlex
- W1993946558
- Cited by
- 38
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 1 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 3
- FWCI
- 1.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Water and Health (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Millennium Challenge Corporation
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Water Science and Technology › Water Resource Management and Quality
- Health Sciences › Nursing › Nutrition and Dietetics › Child Nutrition and Water Access
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Water Science and Technology › Water Quality and Resources Studies
- Keywords
- water access, improved water supply, straight-line distance, route length, water fetching, rural households
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Family Characteristics, Female, Humans, Male, Mozambique, Rural Population, Time Factors, Travel, Water Supply, Geographic Information Systems, Self Report
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