Rural communities often face problems of securing sustainable supply of water for drinking, domestic and agricultural uses, due to fluctuations in water availability, organizational problems maintaining collective networks, and weak connections with external actors. Using a water resilience lens, we present a participatory approach to develop an operational framework to characterize the resilience of rural water supply systems (RWSS) in communities in Northeast Brazil and Central Tunisia. An operational resilience framework was co-designed that incorporates the three key functions of a resilient RWSS, encompassing (1) the productive function: to provide water at all times, even in the case of shocks and stresses; (2) the internal regulation function: the community institutions enabling to organize water supply; and (3) the territorial integration function: the ways in which a community is integrated territorially. The operational framework gives practical content to the notion of rural water resilience by defining the features of water resilience for each function and by establishing the explanatory variables for these features at the intersection of scientific, practical, and local perspectives on rural water resilience. It provides an operational basis for building more resilient RWSSs and aims to increase the efficacy of development interventions in the field of rural water supply to build long lasting responses to shocks and stresses.