functional points / 1,000 people

      Water Failure in Tanzania

      According to the Tanzanian Ministry of Water, there have been over 75,000 water points constructed in rural Tanzania over the past 50 years. In spite of this, 47 percent of Tanzanians still lack access to an improved water source.

      The Ministry of Water defines full water coverage as four functional water points per 1,000 people. Explore the map to see which districts meet this target and which districts are lagging behind.

      This map was made using publicly available data from the Government of Tanzania. The data on the number of functional and non-functional water points is from the Ministry of Water’s website. Both the population data and the urban/rural classification reflect the 2012 Tanzanian Census reports. District-level and ward-level geographic data was downloaded from the Tanzanian National Bureau of Statistics’ website. The remaining geographic data is from Natural Earth Data. The map was built on d3.js with web development by Sam Matthews.

      Please note that this analysis only includes rural water points, as the Water Point Mapping (WPM) project undertaken by the Tanzanian Ministry of Water was created specifically to monitor rural water points. The population totals for each district, therefore, do not include the population of wards classified as urban (a ward is an administrative boundary in Tanzania — regions are made up of districts, and districts are made up of wards.)

      The Tanzanian Ministry of Water defines water coverage as four functional water points per 1,000 people. In order to get the most accurate analysis, we calculated the water point coverage score for each ward by dividing the total number of functional points by the total rural population and then multiplying by 1,000. We then summarized these scores by district.

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