Sustainability assessment of community-based water supply projects: A multi-criteria decision approach

In developing countries, Community-based projects of water supply (CBWS) are implemented rapidly as an improved solution to rural water supply systems. However, sustainability has been a major concern for these projects. Analytical hierarchy process, a Multi-criteria decision framework is used in this study to evaluate the sustainability of four types of community-based water supply schemes and compare the results to focus on the relative performance of each type, analyze the drawbacks and thus bring about necessary modifications in decision making for the stakeholders. 57 quantifiable sub-criteria were identified and weighted to model the hierarchy structure under Environmental, Economic and Social criteria of sustainability. Several supply sources belonging to those 4 CBWS types were inspected to be scored for the 57 sub-criteria. The median of the scores of the sources under each type was taken as the score of that type. Data were collected by Household Survey, Site Survey, In-Person interviews, Expert Opinion and Observation. The study results show that supply sources that run under private ownership and operation having more than 100 users show the best sustainability score. Much attention is needed to sources that are owned and operated by the government solely. The completeness of the study made a robust baseline that can identify strategies and suggest efficient management in similar rural community-based water supply projects. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.