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Alternative indicators of handpump functionality: Toward consistent performance-oriented monitoring [1]

['Catherine Mcmanus', 'Department Of Environmental Sciences', 'Engineering', 'University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill', 'Chapel Hill', 'North Carolina', 'United States Of America', 'Kaycie Lane', 'Department Of Civil', 'Environmental Engineering']

Date: 2025-10 

Many people in rural Sub-Saharan Africa use a communal handpump as their primary drinking water source. Handpump performance is assessed as “functionality,” typically measured using a binary indicator of whether a pump can produce water. This indicator does not reflect service delivery goals defined by the United Nations. We used a cross-sectional dataset of 1682 handpumps from 10 Sub-Saharan African countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) to explore alternative functionality indicators and potential performance standards for those indicators. Alternative functionality indicators studied here included whether a breakdown occurred in the past year and, if so, in the two weeks preceding the survey, downtime during the most recent breakdown, strokes required to produce water, the water produced per subsequent stroke, and service continuity. We conducted a factor analysis to determine the uniqueness of each of these indicators and a threshold analysis to determine the sensitivity of functionality rates (such as “X% of handpumps are functional”) to performance standards. We found that the studied indicators are unique, not redundant, and cannot be combined without an unacceptable loss of performance information. Using Monte Carlo analysis, we found that a functionality assessment using these indicators would be highly sensitive to the thresholds used to evaluate performance. This work demonstrates the importance of selecting functionality indicators to measure progress and thresholds to assess progress. The indicators explored here cannot be reduced or combined and should not be conflated, and selected thresholds may greatly impact how rural handpumps are evaluated. Handpump functionality indicators and thresholds should be selected to reflect performance goals for communal water supply. Once goals are established, indicators and contextualized thresholds can be selected to reflect those goals. Policy decisions related to handpump management should be based on assessments using indicators that reflect the intended policy outcomes.

Copyright: © 2025 McManus et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Introduction

Two hundred million people in Sub-Saharan Africa use approximately 700,000 handpumps as their primary drinking water source [1]. This is more common in rural than urban areas; an estimated 26% of the rural population of Sub-Saharan Africa uses a handpump as their primary source of drinking water, compared to an estimated 7% in urban areas [1]. Despite calls from practitioners and policymakers to shift water service provision from handpumps to piped supplies and on-plot water service [2–4], millions will continue to rely on community handpumps in the 2020s, the 2030s, and beyond [5].

Performance (of any organization or system, not just handpumps) is often measured using key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are used to measure progress in achieving goals set for a system [6], which are visionary and can be subdivided into objectives focusing on a specific component of that vision. Thresholds are then used to evaluate performance according to KPIs – thresholds specify performance standards such as good, fair, or poor. For example, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 sets a goal of “ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” with eight targets. Target 6.1 is to “by 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all.” Target 6.1 is measured using Indicator 6.1.1, “proportion of the population using safely managed drinking water services.” [7].

A safely managed drinking water service is provided by an improved source accessible on premises, available when needed, and free from fecal and chemical contamination [7]. Communal handpumps installed in drilled boreholes (wells) are considered an improved source but are, by definition, not an on-premise water supply. The service these handpumps provide (including an implicit assessment of whether that service is available when needed) is assessed using functionality evaluations.

“Functionality” was defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1983, although no definition of functionality has been formalized or standardized – or distinguished from a definition of “service delivery.” In the decades since 1983, functionality indicators have changed from the WHO’s original approach of monitoring water quantity, quality, handpump reliability, and convenience [8] – an indicator set reminiscent of the definition of safely managed drinking water service. A 2018 study found that functionality is typically measured using a binary indicator reporting if a pump produced any water on the day of an inspection [9]. This indicator reports statistics such as “approximately one in four handpumps in sub-Saharan Africa are non-functional at any point in time.” [10]. In this study, we distinguish the binary functionality indicator from the service delivery goal of functionality by referring to it as “operationality” because it can only be used to report if a pump is operating.

There are several problems with this operationality indicator. Because it is a “yes/no” indicator, it cannot be used to assess pumps along a spectrum of performance; a high-yield, well-maintained handpump is considered the same as a poorly maintained pump that barely produces water [11]. It only reflects the state of handpumps at a single point in time [11], and data are not collected regularly [10] but are used to make claims about sustainability [12,13]. Snapshot assessments, especially those that conflate operationality with sustainability, cannot be used to predict performance over time and do not consider how seasonality affects aquifer and handpump yields [11,14]. They may not consider how the siting, drilling, and design of the borehole and installation of the pump affect performance, including the season of drilling and initial installation [15–17]. A 2018 study in Malawi found that problems with handpumps were more likely to be due to inappropriate initial implementation than due to inadequate ongoing maintenance [18]. However, functionality assessments are often used to evaluate and indict the handpump’s management and maintenance system, despite the many factors that can affect the performance of a handpump. In addition to the quality of initial installation and seasonality, the functionality of a handpump may be affected by the quality of spare parts available in supply chains [19], competing priorities of committee members who volunteer their time [20,21], and water quality [22].

The operationality indicator treats all non-working pumps as equivalently failing; a pump that broke down two hours before a survey is considered the same as a pump that has been broken and unusable for two weeks or months. The important distinction in evaluating these pumps would be the difference in “downtime,” or time that the pump was non-operational due to a breakdown or water resource issue. Pumps were never infallible; the Afridev pump was designed to prioritize simple, swift repairs [23]. The goal is not to avoid breakdowns but to respond to them quickly, and using the operationality indicator does not allow handpump monitors to consider that occasional breakdowns are inevitable.

In response, academic and practitioner groups have developed and are using new indicators and thresholds to measure the performance of rural handpumps. The UPGro Research Consortium (Unlocking the Potential of Groundwater for the Poor) proposed a definition of functionality consisting of two indicators. UPGro assesses handpumps based on “yield” (with a flow rate threshold of 10 liters per minute) and “reliability” (with a threshold of 30 days of cumulative downtime over the preceding year) [9].

Downtime, a measure of how much time a handpump does not produce water due to breakdown or water source supply issues, is increasingly used to monitor handpumps. However, it is used two ways: counting days of downtime experienced cumulatively over a year (as in the UPGro definition) or counting downtime during each breakdown. Uptime, a provider of results-based funding to handpump maintenance organizations, requires that breakdowns be repaired in approximately three days or fewer for an organization to receive financial subsidies. However, they describe this as a cumulative downtime measure (which can be no more than 4% of a quarter) [24]. UNICEF recommends reporting the number of breakdowns per year and the average downtime per breakdown, although this is part of a sustainability check rather than strict “functionality;” UNICEF considers functionality and reliability components of sustainability [25].

Reliability, while an agreed-upon goal for rural water service provision, is not measured using consistent indicators. Some organizations (such as UPGro and Uptime) use downtime as an indicator of “reliability.” In contrast, others use downtime as an indicator of “continuity” and measure reliability using an indicator measuring the frequency (not duration) of breakdowns [26].

Ghana’s Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA) considers reliability a component of service level, not functionality. Once a pump is deemed functional, its service level is assessed – including its reliability, which CWSA assesses using a cumulative downtime threshold of 5% (interpreted as 20 days of downtime over a year) [27]. Before assessing service level, CWSA measures handpump functionality using an indicator reporting how many strokes are required to produce the first drop of water; a pump producing water in five or fewer strokes is considered fully functional [12,27]. This same indicator and threshold (five strokes or fewer to produce water) is used to assess leakage in the rising main or foot valves by Area Mechanics in Malawi [28].

The rationale behind these organizations’ functionality indicators and thresholds is not always reported. Indicators such as efficient water production and breakdown response should be selected to reflect water service or handpump performance goals set by international, national, or local monitoring agencies. Units of these indicators should reflect the monitored service – for example, using units of stroke counts versus flow rates when measuring productivity. While UPGro specified their testing protocol (40 strokes/minute) [29], other tests found that surveyors are inconsistent in stroke rates (the number of strokes per minute) [30]. Indicators based on counting strokes (e.g., number of strokes to produce 20 L of water) were more reliable (across surveyors) than indicators based on controlling or assuming stroke rates to calculate flow rates (in L/min) [30].

Rural water supply delivery chain actors may use other indicators for various purposes. For example, a mechanic may use an indicator selected to monitor productivity (such as volume per stroke or strokes to produce the first drop of water) to identify the need for repairs; if the volume of water produced per stroke declines over time, it may indicate that there is a leak [28,31]. A District Water Officer may use a different indicator (such as days of downtime after a breakdown is reported) to assess the responsiveness of Area Mechanics to breakdowns.

Once indicators are defined, thresholds should be selected carefully, especially if the indicators measure continuous phenomena. Categorizing or “binning” performance (e.g., into “good” and “bad” levels of performance) can be problematic if the indicator used to measure performance is incremental. These problems could be further compounded if the consequences of decreased performance are also incremental (i.e., if no threshold exists at which negative impacts appear). For example, a quantitative microbial risk assessment estimated that each additional day of reliance on raw water will increase a person’s annual probability of E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and Rotavirus infection from drinking water [32]. However, another study in Kenya found that children in households whose pump was repaired within 24 hours had a lower incidence of diarrhea. These benefits were absent for children whose pump was repaired in more than 24 hours [33]. Threshold-setting exercises should consider how thresholds reflect service delivery objectives and the implications of categorical evaluation.

This work explores the applicability and use of seven performance indicators for monitoring and assessing rural handpump functionality. This study aimed to demonstrate how indicators can be evaluated with two objectives: maximizing information collected while minimizing monitoring burden. Using data from ten Sub-Saharan African countries, we 1) conducted factor analysis to determine the uniqueness of each indicator and 2) conducted threshold analysis (including Monte Carlo Analysis) to determine how numerical standards for these indicators could affect calculated functionality rates.

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[1] Url: https://journals.plos.org/water/article?id=10.1371/journal.pwat.0000271

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