Decision support system for economic assessment of water improvements in remote, low-resource settings

Since most people without access to safe water services live in remote areas of developing countries, assessing the economics of rural water developments poses a globally pressing challenge. This study seeks to: (1) outline the rural (non-networked) water development decision process in a systematic way; (2) incorporate that process into a modeling tool in order to conduct consistent economic analysis of developments across a wide range of contexts, and (3) assess the performance and potential applications of this tool. We introduce AWARE, a recently developed Decision Support System, to provide a generalized model of the processes and constraints related to the advancement of rural water services. AWARE enables robust comparisons to be made across a wide range of social, economic, physical, technical and management approaches. We demonstrate that it performs adequately, and propose that, despite its generalized approach, it will be useful for informing both development strategies and field projects.