Measuring affordability : global indicator options for water supply : a paper presented at the Monitoring Sustainable WASH Service Delivery symposiu...

Affordability is one of five criteria of the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, adopted by the Human Rights Council which calls upon States “To continuously monitor and regularly analyse the status of the realisation of the right to safe drinking water and sanitation on the basis of the criteria of availability, quality, acceptability, accessibility and affordability". If services are not affordable, people will not access them in the first place and will be deprived of a basic service. In relation to water and sanitation, affordability has been recognised for decades in various global and regional water declarations and statements, and was in the wording of the water target at the Millennium Declaration in 2000 and the WSSD in Johannesburg in 2002. Many national laws support ‘equitable’, ‘fair’, ‘acceptable’, ‘accessible’, ‘affordable’ or ‘reasonably priced’ drinking water. Many of these indicators are context specific and there are difficulties in defining one indicator which is both country and globally relevant. [authors abstract]