Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was to increase the proportion of the world’s population that has access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation (United Nations, 2010). While the international community has made advancements toward these goal over the past two decades, progress in rural areas is lagging when compared to urban areas (United Nations, 2011). The recent Sustainable Development Goals built on the MDGs proposed a higher measure of access to safely managed water (United Nations, 2015).

Many countries focused on construction of facilities to expand access quickly. However, inadequate attention to post construction O&M led to subsequent collapse of many of these schemes and need for further reinvestment. For instance, a 2009 Water Aid study from Tanzania found that nearly half of improved public water points in rural areas are not functioning, and 25 percent of systems are inoperable after only two years following installation (Taylor, 2009). Similar findings were reported in Nigeria (Andres et al., 2016). These systems fail at such high rates in large part because sustainability of rural water systems in low income countries depends on “the relationship of the user with the life cycle of the water systems” (Jones, 2012).

So to achieve long-term sustainability, governments and development partners started to focus on institutional arrangements that would ensure involvement of users in planning, implementation, and O&M of schemes and financial contribution by users to at least cover the O&M costs. It was important to have infrastructure sustainability, as there was enough evidence that by 2025, nearly 1.4 billion people, amounting to a quarter of the world’s population or a third of the population in developing countries, are destined to face absolute water scarcity (Cosgrove, 2003).

Community driven projects with active beneficiary participation in planning and implementation are likely to be more responsive to the needs of the beneficiaries in creating infrastructure, giving communities control over decisions, improving service delivery, creating ownership, and strengthening the capacity of the communities to undertake other development activities (Chambers, 1983; Sen, 1999; Dongier et. al., 2003). Literature on performance assessment of various community driven, participatory water supply schemes shows that such projects can create effective infrastructure and improve performance of water supply schemes. Participatory-demand-driven models for provision of rural water supply have been found to be successful in delivering well-designed and functioning systems in Ghana and Peru (Thorsten II, 2007). Marks and Davis (2012) reveal that demand based community participation in building drinking water systems increases the community’s sense of ownership for the water system, and improves the functioning of rural water projects in rural Kenya. Isham and Kahkonen (1999) found that greater community participation is associated with improved service delivery in India and Sri Lanka. An assessment of ten community driven projects in Benin, Bolivia, Honduras, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Uganda shows that community driven projects with active beneficiary participation are likely to be more sustainable (Sara and Katz, 1997). Similarly, a more recent study in rural areas of 4