User satisfaction with rural water drinking points in Woliso District, Central Ethiopia Abate Mekuriaw and Birki Gurmessa

Access to safe drinking water is essential to healthy living. Thus, investment in rural drinking water points is increasing in Ethiopia. However, little is known about user satisfaction with rural drinking water points. Therefore, this study was undertaken to investigate determinants of the user’s satisfaction with rural drinking water points in Ethiopia by considering Woliso District (Woreda) as a case study. A semi-structured questionnaire was administered with 211 randomly selected households from six rural Kebeles (administrative areas), which were selected using a stratified sampling technique. Focus group discussions (FGD) and key interviews (KI) were also held along with observation. The quantitative data were analysed through descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression. The qualitative data were used to augment the results from the regression analysis. The results revealed that location of the water point, availability of guards, queueing time, service reliability, and distance significantly influence the satisfaction of users. Therefore, these significant factors should be addressed when planning water supply projects.


INTRODUCTION
Access to safe and sufficient water is essential to healthy living. However, one in three people or 2.2 billion people around the world lack safe drinking water and 4.2 billion people live without access to safe sanitation services (UNICEF & WHO ). In rural areas, 8 out of 10 people globally live without improved drinking water sources (WHO a). On top of this, the 2019 United Nations World Water Development report notes that about 4 billion people, representing nearly two-thirds of the world population, experience severe water scarcity.
The majority of these people live in developing countries.
Water issues in developing countries include scarcity of safe drinking water, poor infrastructure for improved water access, floods, droughts, and the contamination of rivers and large reservoirs. About 827,000 people in low-and middle-income countries die due to inadequate water, determinant for sustainability of water points primarily because users feel a higher sense of ownership, greater confidence in their ability to maintain the water system and promotes a better understanding of how the tariff is used, and also affects their willingness to pay for improvements. How far drinking water points satisfy users' needs can be a key factor affecting the water points operation and maintenance (O&M) and thereby their sustainability (Welle & Williams ).
In the Ethiopian context, although the government has invested and continues to invest in rural drinking water points, the service is primarily suffering from non-functionality of the services. Different studies estimate that more than a

;
Gurmessa & Mekuriaw ). As indicated above, user satisfaction plays an important role in keeping the water points functional (sustainable) as users invest in terms of time and resources to maintain the water points as far as they are satisfied with the services that they get from the points. Sutton et al. () pointed out that sustainability of a drinking water point depends largely on the degree to which users are satisfied with it to be willing to cover the costs of keeping it going. Thus, assessing users' satisfaction with rural drinking water points has a far reaching effect for sustainability of rural drinking water points. Therefore, this study investigates determinants of users' satisfaction with rural drinking water points in Ethiopia by considering the case study of Woliso Woreda, Oromia National Regional State.

Description of the study area
Woliso Woreda (district), as shown in Figure 1, is found in South West Shoa Zone of Oromia National Regional State. It is divided into 37 peasant associations (Kebelesthe lowest administrative unit in Ethiopia composed of one or more villages) and Woliso town, the capital of the Woreda. The town is located 114 km west from the capital city of the country, Addis Ababa. The Woreda is the second largest Woreda in the Zone with a land area of 702.38 km 2 , and it is located between the geographic coordinates of 8 16 0 N-9 2 0 N and 37 31 0 E-38 46 0 E. The highest and the lowest elevations of the Woreda are 2,800 and 1,500 metres above sea level, respectively.
According to the water sector office of the Woreda (2015), the total population of the Woreda is 179,532 and of this number about 154,501 people do have access to potable water supplies. This shows that the coverage with water points is 86%. As per the office records, there are 393 drinking water points throughout the rural Kebeles of the Woreda.

Sample size and sampling technique
A multi-stage sampling design was employed to select Kebeles and users (represented by household heads). First, 6 rural Kebeles with relatively higher numbers of drinking water points, medium and lower numbers of drinking water points were selected after classifying all the 37 rural Kebeles of the study area into 3 strata (Kebeles containing higher, medium and lower numbers of drinking water points). Secondly, the users of the drinking water points were picked proportionally from each of the Kebeles through a simple random sampling technique.
The sample size of the study was decided following Godden's () determination formula which is given below: where n is the desired sample size; Z stands for the standard score at 95% confidence level which is 1.96; p is the estimated target population proportion; q is 1-p; and d is the confidence interval, expressed as a decimal, in this case 0.05. Substituting the values into the formula provided a sample size of 196. By assuming 7.5% for contingency, 211 users were selected for the survey.
In addition, two experts from the water sector office of the Woreda were selected for key interviews, and 3 focus group discussions (FGD) comprised of 6 household heads from each of the Kebeles were organized. The participants for the key interviews and focus group discussions were selected based on their knowledge and experience (participation in construction and subsequent management) of potable water points.

Data source and collection instruments
Both primary and secondary sources of data were used. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data. This tool was used in particular to collect socioeconomic and water point related data (on the variables indicated below in Table 1) from users. The questionnaire was translated into the local language (Oromo language). The qualitative data were also collected from key informant interviews, focus group discussions and observation of the water points. Observation was employed to assess the functionality of sample rural drinking water points. The data collection was carried out with the full consent of the respondents. Upon making the purpose of the data collection (research purpose) clear, data were collected from the respondents with their full knowledge and agreement.

Method of data analysis
Descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage) and regression analysis were employed to analyse the data.
Since the dependent variable is dichotomous (satisfied and not satisfied with the drinking water points), binary models (logit or probit) are used. For simplicity and easy interpretation, the researchers preferred a binary logistic regression model to predict the effects of independent variables on the dependent variable.

Specification of the model
The dependent variable (user's satisfaction with the rural drinking water point) is dichotomous with two values, 1 if  (), the model can take the following equation: In the logistic distribution equation, P i is the probability of user's satisfaction; X i is a set of explanatory variables of the i th user; β 0 þ β 1 are the parameters to be estimated.
Equation (2) (the probability of user's satisfaction) is obtained: The possibility of user's non-satisfaction (1 À P i ) can be depicted in Equation (3) as follows: From the above two equations, the odds ratio in favour of user's satisfaction could thus be: The logit model uses logarithmic transformation to assume linearity of the outcome variable on the explanatory variables. The logit model could thus be expressed as: If the disturbance term u i is considered in the general logit model with a set of variables, the equation becomes: X 1 , X 2 , … X n are independent variables affecting user's satisfaction with rural drinking water points. These explanatory variables are listed in Table 2 below. The variables were selected based on previous empirical studies in the field.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Characteristics of the respondents and their access to the water points From the total 211 respondents, about 71% were males, while 29% of them were females. The mean age was 43, while the maximum and minimum ages were 85 and 23, respectively. The majority of them (47%) were between 39 and 54 years of age. Sixty five per cent had attended formal education, whereas 29% were illiterate and 6% were exposed to some form of non-formal education. The average household size was 5, with a maximum and minimum size of 10 and 1, respectively.
With an average daily water consumption of 40 litres per day per household, on average users fetch water from the water points twice a day. The average per capita water consumption in the study area was 8.87 litres and this figure is the operational functionality of the water points, 62% of the users indicated that the water points that they use were functioning, whereas 38% of them reported that the water points they are using were not functioning at the time of data collection for this study.

Descriptive results
Since the study is about the satisfaction of users with the service that they get from the rural drinking water points (RDWPs), those users where their water points are nonfunctional were dropped from the analysis as measuring the level of satisfaction for the service that they do not get might distort results. Accordingly, the analysis below considers 130 users that had access to functioning water points. Among these respondents, 48.46% of the users indicated that they were satisfied with the services they get from the water points, whereas 51.54% of them reported that they were not satisfied.
As can be seen from  users was 0.54 while the average interruption among unsatisfied users was about three times this figure at 1.54 interruptions per year. Table 3, there is a statistically significant association (Χ 2 ¼ 32.099, p ¼ 0.000) between user satisfaction and the location of the water point. A higher proportion of users, i.e., 63.83% of users who had a conveniently located water point were satisfied with the services, and conversely 36.17% of users were not satisfied although they indicated that their respective water points are in a convenient location.

As indicated in
The very large proportion of users (91.67%) who were unsatisfied indicated that the water points that they use are in an inconvenient location. Similarly, the availability of guards at the water points has a significant association (Χ 2 > ¼18.782, p ¼ 0.000) with the satisfaction of users. While 64.47% of users who had guards at their respective water points were satisfied with the water point services, 35.53% of users who are dissatisfied with the services did not have guards at their respective water points. As shown in Table 3, the incidence of conflict at the water points and perception of possibility of contamination did not show a statistically significant association with satisfaction of users. In order to see the relative importance of these variables, a dominance analysis was carried out following the procedure provided by Azen & Traxel (). Accordingly, location of the water points is found to be the most important (dominant) factor while distance is the least important of the significant explanatory variables. The detail is presented in Table 4. As indicated in Table 4

Presence of guards at the water points
The presence of guards at the water points is another important factor found to be statistically significant ( In other words, the probability of user satisfaction decreases by 4.56 per cent when the number of water service interruptions increases by one per year. This result is obvious in that any breakdown at the water points hampers users from getting an adequate amount of water at a time. When the incidence of breakdown increases, it lowers user satisfaction.

Distance from water point
The distance of users from the water points is another important factor found to affect user satisfaction. Similar to the waiting time, distance is found to be a negative and statistically significant factor that affects the satisfaction of users of the rural water scheme services. reported that they were not satisfied with the water points they were using. It was also found that location of the water point, availability of guards, queueing time, service reliability, and distance between the user's house and the water point significantly influence the satisfaction of users.
Location is a dominant factor that could be interpreted in terms of distance, security and other communal attributes of a rural drinking water point. In addition, hiring guards for the water points also contributes to the satisfaction of users.
Although neglected in other studies, guards are particularly crucial in safeguarding the water points from livestock, fetch water as noticed in the study area. It is therefore essential to address the issue of location and distance when physically installing the water points, and put mechanisms in place to maintain service reliability, ensure shorter queues and safeguard the water points with guards.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Data cannot be made publicly available; readers should contact the corresponding author for details.