Analysing Safely Managed Drinking Water in the Pacific
Global Development Indicators - Global Studies
Carmen Manzanedo and Ángela González
22 may., 2024
Introduction
For this example of global monitoring, the data will be extracted from the SDG database. Our variable of interest is closely related with SDG 6, whose aim is to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
As we know, water is essential for global development for many reasons. The most obvious one is our survival but the use of water goes beyond having enough water to drink and ensure our hygiene and health. Water is completely necessary for agriculture, an economic sector of relevance in the whole world. In fact, our development as a species has its roots in agriculture itself, which shows how important water is for development. Livestock as well is heavily reliant on water availability and we depend on livestock in order to have access to food.
The area of interest for this analysis is the Pacific, composed of thousands of tiny islands where access to water may be difficult to achieve. On this premise, we expect to find variate results between States, as these countries might differ a lot from one another in many aspects. It is important to mention that the World Bank does not provide data for every single country in the Pacific, however, we consider that there is enough data to carry out our analysis
Data manipulation and filtering
First, we must obtain our data from the SDG database on SDG 6. Since this SDG covers many areas, we have decided to focus on target 6.1, whose aim is to: “By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all”. Within this target, this project focuses on indicator 6.1.1, which measures the “Proportion of population using safely managed drinking water services.” This indicator is classified as a Tier II and therefore, some data won’t be available, like the difference between rural and urban areas or some countries which are missing.
For a better understanding of the object of study it is interesting to know what exactly does target 6.1.1. measure. To begin with, it measures people using safely managed drinking water services as a percentage of the population. This safely managed water must come from improved sources which are available when needed and free from faecal contamination. Some examples would be piped water, tube wells, protected dug wells, and packaged or delivered water. Finally, this data is measured by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene. This collection of data supposedly takes place annually and the data are obtained from administrative sources, national censuses and nationally representative household surveys.
After this, we decide to join our data with codelist, so that we can then easily select and filter the region that we want to study, the Pacific. Once we have our data joined, it is time to filter what we exactly want to analyse, which is the proportion of population using safely managed water in the Pacific, separating our data between the regions of Micronesia, Polynesia and Melanesia. For the time period covered, since it’s the study of the evolution, we take data from the year 2000 until 2021.
Analysis
After having prepared our data to carry out our analysis, we will first look at those countries which are doing worse, which are probably more interesting, as experts should focus in these areas which lag behind in order to improve their situation. Otherwise, this lack of development can deeply affect overall results.
region23 | iso3c | GeoAreaName | Safewater | TimePeriod |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Polynesia | WSM | Samoa | 62.14566 | 2,021 |
Melanesia | FJI | Fiji | 41.73755 | 2,021 |
Polynesia | TON | Tonga | 29.50862 | 2,021 |
Micronesia | KIR | Kiribati | 14.19515 | 2,021 |
Polynesia | TUV | Tuvalu | 8.66728 | 2,021 |
Even though Samoa is among the five countries with the worst results, it still manages to cover more than half of its population, which probably isn’t that bad. However, the next on the list is Fiji, with a significant difference of 20 percentage points. Following this, Tonga’s results are even lower, and the difference becomes steeper as we go down the list, with Tuvalu only covering around 9% of its population. However, these results do not represent the whole Pacific region, and we must also take into consideration those countries with good results.
To be able to see our data easily, a scatter plot is provided, in which we separate each region and show the evolution of the variable that we are analysing. In this way, we can compare each country while at the same time see their evolution, without forgetting about the mean for each of the regions.
To begging with, we observe that on a regional basis, Micronesia has improved the most, with an increase of almost 15 percentage points. Melanesia shows similar results, which are still positive. However, when it comes to Polynesia, something must have gone wrong, since they are doing worse than 20 years ago. One explanation that might have biased the average is the fact that both French Polynesia and Niue have suffered a decrease in the percentage of the population who have access to drinking water.
Irrespective of regional disparities, what interests us the most is the huge differences that we can find between countries, both within and between regions. Tuvalu, Kiribati, Tonga and Fiji are showing awful results in comparison to others such as New Caledonia or Guam. Therefore, we conclude that there must be some explanation behind it.
Our fist hypothesis is that the poverty levels of these countries might have some influence, since providing safely managed water can become quite expensive. As a result, we decided to analyse the poverty levels in this region, using the same method that we used with water, using left join and filtering our results.
region23.x | iso3c | GeoAreaName.x | Safewater | TimePeriod.x | Poverty | TimePeriod.y |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Melanesia | FJI | Fiji | 41.86358 | 2,022 | 1.3 | 2,019 |
Micronesia | KIR | Kiribati | 14.41407 | 2,022 | 1.7 | 2,019 |
Polynesia | WSM | Samoa | 62.19171 | 2,022 | 1.2 | 2,013 |
Polynesia | TON | Tonga | 29.52870 | 2,022 | 1.8 | 2,015 |
Provided with the results, our theory seems to be wrong. First, available data for the Pacific was rather limited. Tuvalu was not available and data for the countries doing best in terms of drinking were missing, only having data for Samoa, in the middle of the ranking. However, it provided data on three out of the four countries which show the worst results. To our surprise, in Fiji, Tuvalu and Kiribati (for which data was available only until 2019), the percentage of the population living in poverty did not even reach 2% of the population. Meanwhile, even though poverty has decreased in Samoa, it used to be over 2%. This means that while the country did worse in economic terms, it did better in managing safe drinking water. Therefore, the economic situation of these countries does not allow us to extrapolate conclusions on why their levels are lower than the rest. We can then assume that economy is not behind bad results in safely managed drinking water.
Another hypothesis is that maybe those countries with the largest number of islands were doing worse due to logistics, as it may be very difficult to provide water supply for a hundred different islands. However, this theory was revoked soon. It is true that Fiji has over 300 hundred islands and Tonga around 170. Yet, Tuvalu is only composed of 9 islands and Kiribati has 32 atolls. Therefore, if those with less islands are doing worse than Fiji and Tuvalu, our hypothesis on the number of islands becomes obsolete.Therefore, we suspect that maybe the reason can be explained based on geographical characteristics.
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If something can be observed is that those countries doing worst are located close to the equator and are neighbouring states, or at least with one of the 4 countries that don’t show good results of safely managed drinking water provision. Moreover, we see that countries with many islands like French Polynesia are doing great, showing that our hypothesis number two was also flawed. However, some of the countries doing great, like Niue or New Caledonia, are also located close to our states of interest.
Despite this, even if they share geographic location, their characteristics are different. Kiribati is composed of atolls, which don’t have large bodies of fresh water. Tonga doesn’t have many bodies of fresh water either, since it is composed of islands of volcanic or coralline origin. Kiribati similarly is composed of atolls and coral reefs. Fiji is a little bit more variate, with some islands being fertile and larger bodies of fresh water. This can explain why out of the 4, it is doing the best.
Finally Niue’s characteristics are quite the opposite, with a large plateau where fresh water is available. Similarly, New Caledonia is characterized by its mangroves, large bodies of fresh water.
Conclusion
To sum up, our conclusion regarding the analysis of the Pacific Islands and the people using safely managed drinking water services in the region is that there is no clear answer to why some islands have more access to drinking water than others. However, there might exist a pattern of geographical conditions that make it easier for some countries in the region to provide safely managed drinking water.
We came up with different hypotheses that could be the reason behind those countries lagging behind. For example, the poverty levels of the different islands, or the amount of islands in each country, however they did not give us the expected results. Poverty levels were low both for countries doing well as for our outliers, which didn’t highlight any pattern. The same happened with countries with many islands, some of which were able to provide drinking water while others couldn’t manage to do so properly.
Our final conclusion after some research could be that the problem here is the geographical characteristics of the islands. First, our outliers are located close to the equator. More importantly, these four countries do not have large bodies of fresh water due to their geography, while others such as Niue can easily access these types of bodies of water. As a result, a pattern of favourable or unfavourable geographic conditions might have enough explanatory power to illustrate why some countries which are located within the same region show huge disparities between them.
Therefore, the international community still has much work to do in the region along with the governments of the different countries, helping them to achieve SDG 6 and provide better services for the citizens of the regions which lag behind.