Water for Everything: Year-Round Multiple-Use Services Linked to Lower Water Insecurity in Rural Mali

In the dry savannas of southern Mali, a single borehole or hand pump rarely tells the whole story of a household’s relationship with water. Families draw from wells, ponds, rivers, and standpipes not only to drink, cook, and bathe, but also to water livestock, irrigate vegetable gardens, make bricks, and brew shea butter. For more than a decade, development practitioners have argued that water systems designed around this reality, rather than around the artificial divide between domestic and productive use, could deliver outsized benefits. A new study published in PLOS Water now offers some of the most direct evidence yet that this approach, known as multiple-use water services, or MUS, is associated with measurably lower household water insecurity, while also cautioning that the relationship is more conditional than advocates might hope.

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