Improving drinking water access and equity in rural Sub‐Saharan Africa

In 2021, access to clean drinking water was still a luxury for millions of people worldwide. Building new water projects, such as handpumps and small piped systems, is the primary operational response by many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to bring people their first access to clean water in rural areas of developing countries. Based on knowledge gained from our collaboration with a local NGO and an international NGO and field research in Ethiopia, our research studies where to build new water projects optimally. We first develop a decentralized water project location optimization model based on current practice of a decentralized decision‐making and project management system and an equal per‐beneficiary budget. We further propose three new models to improve both water access and equity: a minimax model, an equitable budget model, and a centralized model that leverages the existing community involvement. Through numerical studies, we compare the model solutions and generate recommendations for NGOs. Lastly, motivated by the current civil war in Ethiopia, we develop a stochastic model to study how to improve drinking water access while mitigating the negative impact of water project supply shocks such as war. Our work studies the previously overlooked problem of drinking water access in rural areas of developing countries. It provides a generalizable and scalable methodology and managerial insights to NGOs building new water projects by combining large geo‐coded datasets and field data.