A ‘User Satisfaction Survey’ of water users has been carried out in the Akatsi South District of the Volta Region. The survey is to determine how satisfied water users are with services delivered by service providers in the district.
Published on: 29/07/2013
In an interview, a Senior Research Officer of Triple-S Ghana, Dr. Tyhra Kumasi "A user satisfaction survey is a very important tool that can play a key role in identifying issues, or key drivers, that cause satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the quality of service delivery. This will inform areas that require corrective action and improvement for necessary action to be taken".
The survey comprised questions on water supply, facility reliability, affordability, water management by the service providers among others. The results will offer the opportunity to triangulate the results with functionality, service levels and sustainability indicators being monitored by the District Assembly.
According to Dr. Kumasi, the district has already undertaken a functionality tracking and performance survey of service providers and authorities in the district. These were geared at monitoring the level of service delivered by the facility, the service providers and the district assemblies. She said "We are now going to collect data on user satisfaction". "In the earlier survey on functionality and performance tracking, there was a very important aspect of the survey that was not looked at and that is the users of the water and their perspectives on service provision".
Dr. Kumasi said, "The survey will look at what users think of their facility, and the quality of water. They will also enquire about services provided by the Water and Sanitation Management Teams (WSMT), are they happy with how WSMT are managing the facilities or systems? If they are not what is the way forward?.
She said sections of findings from this survey on SenseMaker will be compared to earlier data collected in 2011. This will help establish a relationship between the service provider perspective and user perspectives of the nature, quantity and quality of services being delivered.
A three-day training session has therefore been organized for a team of enumerators, in accordance with the survey, on the use of the Field Level Operating Watch (FLOW) for data collection to build their competences and a field visit to pre-test the instrument.
The enumarators were Environmental Health Assistants (EHA) drawn from the District Works Department (DWD) and District Water and Sanitation Teams (DWST) departments of the Akatsi District Assembly. The first day of the training session was used to introduce enumerators to the instruments of the data collection.
The remaining two days was used to undertake a field testing of the survey instruments before actual data collection. The team visited a number of communities, which are not part of selected communities for the user satisfaction survey.
