Comparing utility-reported hours of piped water supply to households’ experiences

Piped water supplies that deliver water only intermittently serve more than one billion people around the world. Measuring the continuity of these intermittent water supplies (IWS) is necessary for tracking utility performance and understanding the impact on consumers. We compared reporting of IWS continuity between utility benchmarking data on hours of water supply and households’ reports of water outages in piped systems in Peru. Nationally, the estimated population with IWS as reported by households (23–26%) was slightly higher than that reported by utilities (20–21%) from 2010 to 2014. While the national population with IWS was markedly similar between both measures, household- and utility-reported IWS matched in only 2 of the 23 regions of Peru. We examined the influence of varying thresholds of water supply continuity on the results. Our findings highlight a need to reconcile different approaches to monitoring piped water supply continuity.