A decision support tool to place drinking water sources in rural communities

Installing more drinking water sources is a promising way to achieve the 6th sustainable development goal “Clean water and sanitation” in rural communities. A key parameter for the installation of new water pumps is geographical position, because the number of people who could gain access to drinking water depends on the location of the pump. To improve the choice of the most appropriate location, we propose a decision support tool to place a new drinking water source in a rural community. This tool relies on four complementary maps, which are obtained from GPS data, survey data, and a water source choice model. The first map shows the spatial distribution of the households and of the existing water sources in the village. The three remaining maps present the following quantities as a function of the position of a new drinking water source in the village: the number of users of the new drinking water source, the improvement of drinking water access, and the daily water demand per capita at the new drinking water source. The decision support tool is applied to a village in Burkina Faso. Results indicate that using the proposed method could allow eight times more people to gain access to drinking water in comparison to a random positioning of the new drinking water source. The original contribution of this work is, first, the consideration of existing water sources in the village, as well as seasonality. Second, we base our analysis on a water source choice model, which accounts for water quality in addition to the distance to the water source. Third, we consider the variability of the water volume collected by the households throughout the village. The developed tool is generic, transferable to other villages and useful for various decision-making entities (e.g. local authorities and non-governmental organizations). [Display omitted] •The proposed method helps to place drinking water sources in developing countries.•It is based on GPS data, survey data, and a water source choice model.•The developed decision support tool is applied to a rural village of Burkina Faso.•8 times more people get drinking water with the tool than with random positioning.•Collecting data to apply the tool costs 2–10% of the cost of a pumping system.