Mozambique: Rural Water Supply Baseline Study 2011

In 2007, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) signed a $506.9 million compact designed to reduce poverty in Mozambique by promoting sustainable economic growth. Among the planned investments was the installation of 600 improved water points in rural communities across the provinces of Nampula and Cabo Delgado. In addition to the installation of the water points, the Rural Water Points Installation Program (RWPIP) also mobilized water committees to maintain the infrastructure and provided trainings to water committees and community members. Most of the water points are boreholes equipped with Afridev handpumps, but in Cabo Delgado ten small-scale solar systems (SSSS) were installed where there was sufficient water supply and unmet demand. The Rural Water Supply Activity (RWSA) of the Mozambique Compact is intended to increase sustainable access to improved water supply in some of the country’s poorest districts.

The data included in this resource relate to an impact evaluation of the Millennium Challenge Account’s (MCA’s) Rural Water Point Implementation Program (RWPIP) in Nampula. The objective of the impact evaluation of the RWPIP was to examine the extent to which the program objectives were realized. Rigorous impact evaluations should allow causal claims to be made about program interventions and observed changes in outcome indicators, typically by comparing the beneficiaries of the program to a non-beneficiary comparison group. In order to assess the impacts of the installed handpumps on households in the RWPIP communities, the research design employed a panel survey in the treatment and comparison groups. Panel surveys are specifically designed to compare changes in treatment communities “before” and “after” an intervention with changes in comparison communities that did not receive the intervention. This design permits a “difference-in-differences” approach to the analysis of data collected, which controls for general trends that affect both treatment and comparison communities (e.g., drought, high crop prices, or other development interventions). To collect the panel data, a baseline survey was undertaken in 2011 and a follow-up survey was undertaken in 2013.