The research, conducted by Matt Stellbauer, Wendy Jepson, Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey, Nicole Lefore, John Casellas Connors, and Edward Kato, analyzed survey data from 1,082 households across rural Mali. The team measured water insecurity using the Household Water Insecurity Experiences scale, widely abbreviated as HWISE, a validated instrument that asks households about concrete experiences over a defined recall period: whether they went to bed thirsty, whether they worried that water would run out, whether they had to change what they ate because water for cooking was scarce, and whether they felt shame or anger over their water situation. By scoring these experiences, the HWISE scale converts a diffuse development problem into a quantifiable, comparable metric.

The conceptual starting point for the study is a shift that has reshaped water policy in lower- and middle-income countries over the past ten years. Traditional water investments were siloed: domestic systems were engineered to meet a household’s drinking and hygiene needs, while irrigation schemes and livestock watering points were planned separately, often by different ministries or donor programs. Yet field observations repeatedly showed that rural households ignore these categories. A hand pump installed for drinking water becomes a laundry station and a cattle trough; an irrigation canal doubles as a source of washing water. Multiple-use water services emerged as a planning philosophy that takes people’s full portfolio of water needs as the point of departure, upgrading or designing systems so that a single service can safely and reliably serve both households and small-scale production.

Earlier studies had suggested that MUS could improve water productivity and generate economic gains for subsistence farming communities, but the evidence base remained fragmented and context dependent. What had never been systematically examined was the question that matters most to families: does practicing multiple-use water services actually reduce the lived experience of water insecurity, defined as inadequate, unreliable, or unaffordable access to the water necessary for a healthy life? The Malian dataset allowed the researchers to test exactly this, linking HWISE scores to whether households used the same water sources for both domestic and productive purposes, and whether they did so year-round or only in certain seasons.

The central finding is striking in its clarity. Households that practiced multiple-use water services throughout the entire year reported significantly lower water insecurity than households that practiced MUS only seasonally. In other words, the families who could rely on the same sources to satisfy drinking, cooking, washing, livestock, and irrigation needs across all seasons scored better on the HWISE scale than families whose productive water access evaporated during part of the year. The seasonal contrast is analytically important, because it isolates the dimension that engineers and planners can actually influence: the temporal reliability of water availability, not merely its existence at some point in the calendar.

The authors are careful, however, to frame the result as an association rather than a causal relationship. Households with year-round MUS may enjoy lower water insecurity because the practice itself buffers them against scarcity, but it is equally plausible that both phenomena share a common underlying driver: reliable, year-round water availability. A household located near a perennial source, or served by infrastructure that functions in both wet and dry seasons, can simultaneously sustain productive uses and avoid the experiences of insecurity that the HWISE scale captures. Disentangling cause from consequence would require longitudinal or experimental designs that are difficult to mount in the region, and the study does not claim more than the cross-sectional data can support.

That caution leads directly to the study’s most policy-relevant conclusion: MUS is not a panacea for household water insecurity. Simply encouraging or permitting multiple uses of a water point does not guarantee security if the underlying service is unreliable, if the source dries up seasonally, or if the quantity available cannot stretch across domestic and productive demands. Improving household water security, the authors argue, will require attention to the reliability, availability, and seasonal stability of water services in addition to support for multiple water uses. This reframing matters for donors and governments, because it suggests that investments should be judged not by whether a system permits productive use, but by whether it sustains that use through the lean months when insecurity peaks.

The technical logic behind the seasonal finding deserves unpacking. In the West African Sahel, hydrology is dominated by a short rainy season followed by a long dry season during which surface water contracts, water tables drop, and demand from livestock and gardens intensifies precisely as supply diminishes. A water system that performs adequately in the wet season can fail catastrophically in the dry months, forcing households to revert to distant, contaminated, or expensive alternatives. Households practicing year-round MUS, by definition, retain access to sources that survive this stress test, which means their productive activities continue and their domestic needs are met without the trade-offs, rationing, and anxiety that characterize insecurity. Seasonal MUS households, by contrast, experience a predictable collapse of their water portfolio, and the HWISE data register that collapse as elevated insecurity.

The implications extend beyond Mali. Across much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, rural livelihoods are built on small-scale mixed farming, and the household is simultaneously a consumption unit and a production unit. Water policies that ignore this duality risk systematically underestimating the volumes communities actually need and misdesigning infrastructure around a single-use fiction. The Malian results suggest that the HWISE scale, originally developed to track domestic water insecurity globally, can serve as an outcome measure for evaluating multiple-use water programs, giving the MUS movement a standardized yardstick it has lacked. They also hint at a virtuous cycle: households with secure, year-round water are better positioned to invest labor and capital in productive uses, which in turn strengthens the economic case for maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure that makes year-round access possible.

What remains open is the causal question and its practical corollary: if reliable year-round availability underpins both MUS practice and water security, then the highest-leverage interventions may be those that extend service reliability, through storage, borehole deepening, solar pumping, or maintenance systems, rather than those that merely designate water points as multiple-use. The study’s authors stop short of prescribing, but the direction of their findings is unmistakable. In rural Mali, the families who escape water insecurity are not simply those with more infrastructure; they are those whose water, for everything they need it to do, is there in every month of the year. Closing that seasonal gap, the research implies, is where the next generation of water development should focus its attention and its funds.

Subject of Research: The association between multiple-use water services and household water insecurity in rural Mali

Article Title: Beyond infrastructure: Linking multiple-use water services and experiences with household water insecurity in rural Mali

Article References: Stellbauer, M., Jepson, W., Osborne-Gowey, J., Lefore, N., Connors, J. C., & Kato, E. (2026). Beyond infrastructure: Linking multiple-use water services and experiences with household water insecurity in rural Mali. PLOS Water, 5(8), e0000600. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000600

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000600

Keywords: water insecurity, multiple-use water services, MUS, HWISE scale, rural Mali, household water access, seasonal water availability, water infrastructure, West Africa, water policy, domestic and productive water use, PLOS Water

The core of the argument is methodological. Conventional assessments of water security rely on hydrological modelling, infrastructure inventories and supply-side statistics: how many pipes exist, how much water is available, how many connections are installed. These measures say nothing about whether the water that reaches a household is safe, reliable, acceptable or affordable, or about the trade-offs families make when it is not. Experiential scales change that. The Household Water Insecurity Experiences Scale, known as HWISE, was developed and validated for low- and middle-income settings and asks households directly about problems such as worrying about having enough water, going without washing, or drinking water they believed was unsafe. Similarly, the Food Insecurity Experiences Scale and the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale capture lived experiences of hunger and dietary compromise. When deployed together, these instruments reveal coupled deprivation that neither measure can expose alone.

The clearest illustration comes from Walgett, a remote town of roughly 2,000 people in northern New South Wales, where the Barwon and Namoi rivers meet. Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations there had raised concerns about drinking water quality for years. In 2018, national media reported that sodium concentrations in the town supply had reached approximately 300 milligrams per litre, nearly double the Australian palatability guideline and far above levels recommended for people managing chronic conditions such as hypertension and kidney disease, which occur at high prevalence in Aboriginal populations. From a purely infrastructural standpoint, Walgett had a functioning water system. From the perspective of the people drinking the water, it was a system that many could not safely or acceptably use.

In 2022, supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council Ideas Grant, the community ran a survey using the internationally validated HWISE and food insecurity instruments. The results were stark. Forty-six per cent of participants experienced food insecurity and 44 per cent experienced water insecurity, while almost one third experienced both at the same time. Participants who were water insecure were far more likely to be food insecure, a statistical association that turns the abstract policy language of integration into a measurable household reality. Four out of five respondents relied on bottled water, typically spending between 30 and 50 Australian dollars a week on it. In a low-income community, that recurring expenditure directly competes with the household food budget, effectively converting a water quality failure into a nutrition problem.

The surveys also changed the politics. Wendy Spencer, General Manager of the Dharriwaa Elders Group, described the shift in terms that capture why experiential data matters beyond its technical content. Prior to the surveys, she said, the community knew there was a problem but no one would listen; the data gave them a voice and helped inform their solutions. That observation goes to the heart of the authors’ case. Infrastructure descriptors and aggregate supply statistics cannot register the daily decisions of a parent choosing between bottled water and fresh vegetables, but a validated experiential scale can, and in doing so it creates evidence that institutions are obliged to engage with.

Walgett is not an outlier. Modelling by the Australian National University, published in npj Clean Water, estimated that more than 600,000 people across more than 400 locations are likely consuming water that does not meet health guidelines for quality, and that 44 per cent of those locations are Aboriginal communities. Read together with the Walgett survey findings, this points to a systemic national problem rather than a collection of local anomalies. Yet the authors note that Australia’s current consultation on a National Food Security Strategy does not explicitly position water insecurity as a priority area. Without experiential indicators embedded in national monitoring, they argue, the strategy risks addressing food supply and affordability while overlooking the fundamental constraint that unsafe or unacceptable water places on what households can prepare, drink and afford.

The mechanism linking water to food is worth spelling out, because it operates through several distinct pathways. Poor water quality forces substitution: households avoid the tap and buy bottled water or switch to sugar-sweetened beverages, a pattern documented in international research on tap water avoidance and diet-related disease. Unreliable supply disrupts food preparation and hygiene, raising the risk of gastrointestinal illness that itself worsens nutritional status. And the financial burden of alternative water sources crowds out spending on healthy food. Each pathway is invisible in infrastructure statistics, and each becomes quantifiable when water insecurity is measured experientially alongside food insecurity. This is why the authors describe integration as a methodological necessity rather than an advocacy aspiration.

The same logic is now spreading through the Asia Pacific. In Timor-Leste, an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research-funded project led by Permatil, a community-based organisation promoting permaculture and sustainable livelihoods, has begun training local practitioners and piloting the Food Insecurity Experiences Scale and the Water Insecurity Experiences Scales. Outcome data are not yet available, but the initiative demonstrates a capacity-building model in which local organisations lead survey implementation, ethical data collection and community-centred evidence generation, embedding experiential measurement within broader water management and food system work. For a young nation where households face interacting pressures from climate variability, the approach offers a way to detect vulnerability that conventional indicators alone cannot capture.

For the water research and engineering community, the implications are practical rather than rhetorical. The authors point to case studies from Nepal and Sierra Leone showing that experiential water insecurity measures are useful for monitoring and evaluating WASH programs, revealing behavioural and economic barriers that determine whether technically sound interventions actually improve lives. Paired with biophysical indicators, experiential data provide a fuller picture of system performance: they can sharpen targeting, strengthen accountability, and test whether policies are moving the outcomes that matter to households. The metrics the authors propose are concrete and demanding: fewer families forced to spend scarce income on bottled water, fewer households facing trade-offs between water and food, and more equitable access to safe, reliable drinking water.

What makes the argument compelling is that it reframes who defines the problem. A water system can look adequate on paper while failing the people it serves, and a food strategy can project national abundance while households in remote communities ration both what they drink and what they eat. Measuring experiences closes that gap between system-level adequacy and household-level reality, and the Walgett case shows the data can shift power as well as policy, giving Aboriginal community organisations the evidence to demand and design their own solutions. As climate change accelerates and water variability deepens across Australia and the Asia Pacific, the authors’ conclusion is blunt: integrating experiential measures of water insecurity into food security measurement and policy is no longer optional. It is the difference between a strategy that counts pipes and one that counts people.

Subject of Research: Experiential measurement of household water and food insecurity to inform integrated food and water security policy in Australia and the Asia Pacific

Article Title: Measuring people’s experiences to inform integrated solutions to food and water security in Australia and the Asia Pacific region

Article References: Webster, J., Spencer, W., Corby, C., Lemos, E., & Leslie, G. (2026). Measuring people’s experiences to inform integrated solutions to food and water security in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. PLOS Water, 5(10), e0000647. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000647

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000647

Keywords: water insecurity, food security, HWISE scale, Walgett, Timor-Leste, Aboriginal health, drinking water quality, experiential measures, PLOS Water, climate variability, national food strategy, Asia Pacific

Juliana Bem-Lignani of the State University of Rio de Janeiro and Rosana Salles-Costa of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro analyzed data from the First Survey on Food and Nutritional Insecurity in Rio de Janeiro, conducted in 2024. The survey drew a probabilistic sample of 2,000 households spread across the municipality’s five residential zones: South, Central, North, West and Southwest. Because the sample was designed to represent the city’s households rather than merely the people willing to answer a questionnaire, the results can be generalized to the population of each territory, a critical feature for a study whose central question is precisely geographic.

The instrument at the heart of the study was the Portuguese version of the Water Insecurity Experiences Scale, known as WISE. Unlike measures that simply ask whether a home has a piped connection, experience-based scales probe what actually happens in daily life: whether there was enough water for drinking and cooking, whether the supply was interrupted, whether households had to change routines to cope. This distinction matters technically because a connection to the network does not guarantee an adequate, regular and safe flow, and the authors argue that lived experience captures dimensions of water access that infrastructural indicators miss.

The territorial pattern that emerged was stark. The South and Southwest zones, home to better socioeconomic conditions, reported daily water supply in 82.2 percent and 75.9 percent of households respectively. By contrast, the Central and North zones showed worse socioeconomic indicators and more frequent supply interruptions, affecting 19.2 percent and 20.6 percent of households. The West zone occupied an intermediate position overall but stood out for rationing, with 30.8 percent of households reporting intermittent service. These are not marginal differences; in a city where water is constitutionally recognized as a social right, a fifth of households in some territories facing interruptions represents a substantial equity gap.

Experience-based water insecurity tracked the same geography. In the South and Southwest zones, 25.1 percent and 27.1 percent of households respectively reported water insecurity. In the Central and North zones the figures climbed to 46.9 percent and 48.3 percent, nearly one household in two. In other words, residents of the city’s central and northern territories were experiencing water insecurity at nearly double the rate of those in the wealthier southern coast, a gradient that parallels well-documented disparities in income, food security and health across the same zones.

To test whether the association between territory and water insecurity was real rather than an artifact of household composition, the researchers used multinomial logistic regression, a statistical model suited to outcomes with multiple ordered or unordered categories. Here the outcome was water insecurity at low, moderate or higher levels, and the models were adjusted for the socioeconomic characteristics of the household reference person and for the household’s water access conditions. Adjusting for these covariates is what allows the analysis to ask whether place itself, with all its social and infrastructural history, adds explanatory power beyond the individual household’s profile.

The answer was yes. Compared with households in the South zone, living in the West zone was associated with 2.4 times the odds of low water insecurity, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.5 to 3.7, and living in the North zone carried 2.1 times the odds, with a confidence interval of 1.3 to 3.5. In the Central zone, households had 2.5 times the odds of moderate water insecurity relative to the South, with a confidence interval of 1.2 to 5.2. Because these intervals exclude one, the associations are statistically robust at conventional thresholds, and the consistency of the twofold pattern across separate zones strengthens the interpretation that territory is a meaningful analytical unit for water insecurity.

The study’s conceptual framing draws on the idea that access to water can serve as a marker of social inequities more broadly. Brazil recognizes water as a social right, yet the persistence of unequal access, reliability and quality means that formal legal recognition has not translated into uniform lived experience. The authors conclude that the differences between territories reflect and reinforce social inequalities, and that being connected to the water network alone does not ensure an adequate supply. That finding carries direct policy weight: investments that stop at extending pipes may leave untouched the interruptions, rationing and quality problems that define insecure water access in the poorest territories.

For Rio de Janeiro, the implications point toward policies that target structural and social determinants rather than infrastructure alone. The municipality’s water system is operated by the State Water and Sewage Company, and the city’s history of pronounced territorial disparity, intensified by economic shocks, means that rationing and interruption regimes fall unevenly on households with the fewest resources to buffer them, such as those unable to buy bottled water or store large reserves. The researchers suggest that water insecurity should be monitored alongside food insecurity as a dimension of social inequality, an approach reflected in the survey’s integrated design.

The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Clementino Fraga Filho University Hospital at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and all participants gave informed consent. Funded by Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, the Rio de Janeiro State Research Support Foundation and the city’s municipal council, the work illustrates how experience-based measurement combined with territory-level sampling can turn a diffuse sense of urban unfairness into precise, actionable evidence. As climate variability tightens pressure on urban water systems worldwide, the Rio findings offer a replicable template: map the lived experience of water insecurity, match it to the social geography of the city, and direct policy where the odds are doubled.

Subject of Research: Association between territorial socioeconomic inequality and household water insecurity in Rio de Janeiro

Article Title: Territories marked by social inequities associated with household water insecurity in Rio de Janeiro/Brasil

Article References: Bem-Lignani, J., & Salles-Costa, R. (2026). Territories marked by social inequities associated with household water insecurity in Rio de Janeiro/Brasil. International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-03020-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-03020-9

Keywords: water insecurity, Rio de Janeiro, social inequality, WISE scale, household water access, urban equity, public health, Brazil, cross-sectional study, territorial disparities, water policy, socioeconomic factors