Abstract
Access to a safe, reliable water supply is essential for development and for health. In rural areas there is a shortfall in water supply, infrastructure failure is common and community-management, although often ineffective, predominates. Water supply monitoring is poorly-focused upon information needs for management and often originates from a regulatory-enforcement ethic little applicable to rural areas. This work critically appraises water supply service monitoring and assessment. It focuses upon piped supplies outside the established market economies and examines a series of case studies which are geographically and organisationally diverse to assess the contribution of monitoring to abatement of health risks. A conceptual framework is presented for five linkages, determined by the information product user, between information from monitoring and improved water supply services. Monitoring and assessment are shown to influence water supply service quality and two information-action linkages - concerning overview assessments for policy development and prioritisation of major interventions - are shown to be effective. Monitoring programmes are poorly-optimised to 'drive' these. Two linkages (concerning external operation and maintenance and regulatory enforcement) are ineffective or inapplicable. Monitoring supportive of community management is potentially effective but present trends and policy orientations militate against its application. The effectiveness of information-action linkages and further evidence from the case studies are used to explore implications for information generation. These include advantages of adopting stratified two-stage sampling, combining 'served' and 'un-served' populations and addressing both accessibility and quality issues. Further implications are discussed with respect to information for management, policy, legislation and regulations and institutional aspects. Some of this work has been published previously by the author and has been widely accepted, becoming the underlying structure of the second edition of WHO 'Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality Volume 3: Surveillance and Control of Community Supplies' of which the author was technical coordinator and a major contributor.