Key findings
How we measure poverty shapes how we understand it. Traditional indicators such as income, consumption, and asset ownership provide useful benchmarks but often fail to capture the daily realities of deprivation (Sen, 1985; Ravallion, 2016). Afrobarometer’s Lived Poverty Index (LPI) offers an alternative by shifting the focus to direct experience: how often people lacked access to five basic necessities (food, clean water, medical care, cooking fuel, and a cash income) in the prior year (Mattes, 2008). This approach has clear advantages in settings where informal economies dominate and income is difficult to measure, as is the case in many African countries.
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Access to clean water is not only a key component of the LPI but also a fundamental driver of health, dignity, and development. In 2022, just 73% of the global population used safely managed drinking-water services, with a marked urban-rural divide: 81% of urban residents vs. only 62% of those living in rural areas. Meanwhile, 2.2 billion people remained without safely managed water, including 115 million still drinking directly from surface water (UNICEF, 2025). Across Africa, Afrobarometer data show that citizens rank access to water and sanitation among their highest priorities for government action (Ben Saad & Logan, 2024). Despite improvements in some countries, substantial gaps in access persist, fuelling citizen demand for more equitable and reliable service delivery.
This methods note investigates an empirical puzzle: A substantial number of Afrobarometer survey respondents reporting no lived poverty, meaning they never lacked any of the five life essentials during the previous year, nevertheless lack access to critical services such as piped water, electricity, and sanitation. This paradox suggests that subjective measures like the LPI may be influenced by adaptation strategies (e.g., water storage, long-distance fetching, or community sharing) that help households manage structural deficits without perceiving acute shortages. Consequently, while the LPI captures episodic deprivation, it risks overlooking systemic exclusion from essential infrastructure. The analysis uses Afrobarometer Round 9 data to highlight the relationship between lived poverty and access to water, a core LPI component and a cornerstone of public health and well-being.
The findings reveal a critical gap: Nearly three-tenths of respondents with no lived poverty lack access to piped water, and one in five must fetch water from a source outside their compound. These gaps reflect infrastructural exclusion that persists despite households’ adaptive resilience. These gaps suggest that while the current LPI measure captures short-term material conditions, it may underestimate the true extent of structural deficits in Africa and miss deeper and more persistent forms of exclusion.
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By focusing on examining the mismatch between subjective lived experience and objective infrastructural (in)security in water access, this paper highlights the need for incorporating both perspectives in order to design effective development policies and to track progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 6 – ensuring universal access to safe and affordable drinking water (United Nations, 2015).
Maakwe Cumanzala Maakwe Cumanzala is a Neubauer Family Economics and Public Policy PhD student at Tufts University.
Read the original article on Afrobarometer.
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