Climate change impacts threaten the actual and future achievements to provide safe water in many parts of the world. Drought events are expected to be more intense and prolonged in different areas of Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC), with significant impacts in the volume, timing, and quality of water provided by water suppliers (Kundzewicz & Döll, 2008).

As the disease burden of poor access to water and sanitation declines around the world, the non-health benefits – mainly the time burden of water collection – will likely grow in importance in sector funding decisions and investment analysis. We measure the coping costs incurred by households in one area of rural Kenya. Sixty percent of the 387 households interviewed were collecting water outside the home, and household members were spending an average of two to three hours doing so per day.

Despite its importance in benefit-cost analysis in the water supply, transportation, and health care sectors, there are relatively few empirical estimates of the value of travel time savings (VTT) in low-income countries, particularly in rural areas. Analysts instead often rely on a textbook “rule of thumb” of valuing time at 50% of prevailing unskilled wage rates, though these benchmarks have little empirical support in these settings. We estimate the value of travel time through the use of a repeated discrete choice stated preference exercise.