A Water-Poverty Accounting Framework: Analyzing the Water-Poverty Link

Abstract

Water has been identified as a crucial resource for all life, production, and development, while a lack of access to water has been linked to poverty. Governments and donors have declared a desire to use water in more efficient, equitable, and environmentally sustainable ways. These different links and objectives touch upon many disciplines and people working in and/or dependent on water: economists, sociologists, engineers, politicians, decision-makers, and other stakeholders. There exist tools to describe how water is used in a physical sense and where it is available. There are also methods to examine the multidimensional aspects of poverty. However, until now there has been no tool to effectively examine the availability of water and its use toward matching social and economic goals to physical goals. This paper offers a framework for such an analysis. The Water-Poverty Accounting Framework presented here allows an analyst to effectively see how water is being used to meet different social goals such as hygiene, sanitation, irrigated production for poor farmers, and environmental demands. More importantly, this framework demonstrates the implications for (re) allocations of water when meeting social goals is deemed desirable.

Keywords:

• Water
• poverty
• irrigation
• development targets
• management
• water management