Bangladesh – Commercialization of improved cookstoves in urban slums

Commercialization of Improved Cookstoves for Reduced Indoor Air Pollution in Urban Slums of Northwest Bangladesh, May 2009. (full-text, pdf, 2.86MB) USAID; Winrock.

Beginning in 2003, the energy team of USAID’s Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade, and the environmental health team of the Bureau for Global Health jointly supported a cooperative agreement with Winrock International to develop models to reduce indoor air pollution by combining fuel-efficient cooking technologies with behavior change messages and market-based distribution mechanisms. Winrock developed two project models: a rural model piloted in the highlands of Peru for indigenous communities, and a peri-urban model piloted in Bangladesh for poor households.

The objective of the pilot project was to reduce indoor air pollution and fuel consumption via the dissemination and commercialization of efficient cookstoves among peri-urban communities through an integrated and sustainable household energy intervention. The project aimed to establish a sustainable market for improved and appropriate stoves to avoid the need for subsidies, either current or future.

Three models of fuel-efficient cookstoves, each significantly less polluting than traditional stoves, were selected and promoted in this project. Winrock coupled product promotion with a multi-faceted communication ampaign to raise awareness about the risks of indoor smoke and the benefits of behavior change and using improved stoves to reduce IAP exposure. The project team worked with existing local government institutions and health networks to disseminate behavior change messages, and teamed up with local entrepreneurs to disseminate stoves commercially. The project has strong potential for use as a model for incorporating IAP into child survival and health programming activities, particularly those implemented by donor agencies such as the USAID/Bangladesh Mission.

Urban poor and hungry burgeoning unnoticed

JOHANNESBURG, 13 July 2009 (IRIN) – The number of poor and food-insecure people in developing countries is increasing more quickly in urban areas than in rural areas, and could be dropping off the policy radar, says new research by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“Poverty is still viewed by many as a rural problem, as both governments and donors continue to allocate resources to rural development in order to reverse the bias of urban policies of the 1970s and 1980s,” Shahla Shapouri and Stacey Rosen, researchers in the department’s Economic Research Services, write in the USDA’s Food Security Assessment 2008-09.

In 2008, when the food crisis focused greater attention on agriculture and development in rural areas, for the first time in history more than half the world’s population lived in urban areas, the researchers said, citing UN Population Fund (UNFPA) statistics.

By 2030 the majority of people in all developing countries will live in urban areas, and UNFPA estimates that about 60 percent of the urban slum population will be under the age of 18. “This realization has not yet translated into policy action in most countries,” Shapouri and Rosen noted.

Sub-Saharan African countries have the world’s highest rates of urban growth and highest levels of urban poverty, according to the State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/07 by UN-Habitat, the UN human settlements programme. The slum population in these countries doubled from 1990 to 2005, when it reached 200 million.

The urban poor in Africa are more exposed to economic shocks – as the food price crisis in 2008 demonstrated – particularly in countries importing most of their food requirements.

Poor and food-insecure people will account for a large share of urban growth because of both rural migration and natural growth, since fertility rates are higher among the poor than among higher income populations
In lower-income Latin American and Caribbean countries, 45 percent of total grain supplies between 2004 and 2006 were imported, compared to 31 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, and 12 percent in lower-income Asian countries.

“Poor and food-insecure people will account for a large share of urban growth because of both rural migration and natural growth, since fertility rates are higher among the poor than among higher income populations,” the researchers pointed out.

“These developments will translate to higher poverty and more food insecurity in urban versus rural areas, and present a challenge to create employment opportunities for the urban poor.”

Trying to find a solution

Countries like India and China are trying to implement programmes to slow the pace of urbanization; in sub-Saharan Africa, “governments have increased investment in rural development with the expectation that this will slow the pace of urban migration, but so far there is no evidence to suggest that this will happen,” Shapouri and Rosen warned.

“Can the experience of the developed countries that adjusted and accommodated high urban growth rates be replicated by developing countries? The answer is not simple because of the differences in public attention and investment.”

In days gone by, the wealthy urban population in developed countries forced the authorities to devote attention to poor living conditions in local slums.

However, the rich in developing countries can now afford water pumps and generators for electricity, “thereby protecting themselves from the unhealthy conditions of the urban poor. That schism reduces pressure on developing country governments to invest in urban public services, of which the poor are the main beneficiaries.”

Improved safety-net systems to help cope with food insecurity and economic shocks are likely to become more important as the urban population increases.

Some countries are promoting urban gardening, but limited access to clean water and high population density pose the risk of contamination, the researchers cautioned.

Health hazards emanating from food in urban areas are a critical concern: buying pre-cooked food from street vendors, close contact between humans and poultry and other domestic animals for slaughter, and generally unhygienic conditions in urban markets can have significant health consequences, as has become apparent in China and various countries in Southeast Asia in recent years.

Shapouri and Rosen said quality control and urban agriculture could contribute to a healthier, safer living environment, and recommended improvements in infrastructure that would allow the efficient flow of food into cities from the countryside and via imports.

Source – http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=85265

WEDC Conference 2008 – Selected papers on urban water/sanitation

Below are links to selected presentations on urban water and/or sanitation from the 33rd WEDC Conference in Ghana on Access to Sanitation and Safe Water: Global Partnerships and Local Actions, April 2008. All presentations are in pdf format.

Meeting the hygiene, safe water and sanitation needs of people living with HIV/Aids (PLWHA)

Use now, pay later: An innovative approach to increasing access to improved latrine facilities in Ghana

Water supply systems in selected urban poor areas of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

A new global sanitary revolution: lessons from the past

Addressing the water and sanitation needs of primary schools: Experiences from East Africa

An investigation into linkages between tenure and urban sanitation development

Approaching community-level greywater management in non-sewered settlements in South Africa

Demand management for sustainable urban water services in cities of developing countries

Domestic water supply in Accra: How physical and social constraints to planning have greater consequences for the poor

HCES: A new approach to environmental sanitation planning for urban areas

Performance of private companies involved in urban solid waste management: Evidence from three cities in Ghana

Prejudices and attitudes toward reuse of nutrients from urine diversion toilets in South Africa

Bhopal – water supply is now a deadly issue

India prays for rain as water wars break out

The monsoon is late, the wells are running dry and in the teeming city of Bhopal, water supply is now a deadly issue.

It was a little after 8pm when the water started flowing through the pipe running beneath the dirt streets of Bhopal’s Sanjay Nagar slum. After days without a drop of water, the Malviya family were the first to reach the hole they had drilled in the pipe, filling what containers they had as quickly as they could. Within minutes, three of them were dead, hacked to death by angry neighbours who accused them of stealing water.

In Bhopal, and across much of northern India, a late monsoon and the driest June for 83 years are exacerbating the effects of a widespread drought and setting neighbour against neighbour in a desperate fight for survival.

India’s vast farming economy is on the verge of crisis. The lack of rain has hit northern areas most, but even in Mumbai, which has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding, authorities were forced to cut the water supply by 30% last week as levels in the lakes serving the city ran perilously low.

Across the country, from Gujarat to Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, the state that claims to be “the rice bowl of India”, special prayers have been held for more rain after cumulative monsoon season figures fell 43% below average.

On Friday, India’s agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, said the country was facing a drought-like situation that was a “matter for concern”, with serious problems developing in states such as Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

In Bhopal, which bills itself as the City of Lakes, patience is already at breaking point. The largest lake, the 1,000-year-old, man-made Upper Lake, had reduced in size from 38 sq km to 5 sq km by the start of last week.

The population of 1.8 million has been rationed to 30 minutes of water supply every other day since October. That became one day in three as the monsoon failed to materialise. In nearby Indore the ration is half an hour’s supply every seven days.

The UN has warned for many years that water shortages will become one of the most pressing problems on the planet over the coming decades, with one report estimating that four billion people will be affected by 2050. What is happening in India, which has too many people in places where there is not enough water, is a foretaste of what is to come.

In Bhopal, where 100,000 people rely solely on the water tankers that shuttle across the city, fights break out regularly. In the Pushpa Nagar slum, the arrival of the first tanker for two days prompted a frantic scramble, with men jostling women and children in their determination to get to the precious liquid first.

Young men scrambled on to the back of the tanker, jamming green plastic pipes through the hole on the top, passing them down to their wives or mothers waiting on the ground to siphon the water off into whatever they had managed to find: old cooking oil containers were popular, but even paint pots were pressed into service. A few children crawled beneath the tanker in the hope of catching the spillage.

In the Durga Dham slum, where the tanker stops about 100 metres away from a giant water tower built to provide a supply for a more upmarket area nearby, Chand Miya, the local committee chairman, watched a similar scene. There was not enough water to go around, he said. “In the last six years it has been raining much less. The population has increased, but the water supply is the same.”

Every family needed 100 litres a day for drinking, cooking and washing, he said, and people had no idea when the tanker would come again.

Not everyone gets a tanker delivery. The city has 380 registered slums, but there are numerous other shanties where people have to find their own methods. Some, like the Malviyas, tap into the main supply. Others cluster around the ventilation valves for the main pipelines that stick up out of the ground from place to place, trying to catch the small amounts of water leaking out. In the Balveer Nagar slum, 250 families have no supply at all. The women get up in the middle of the night to walk 2km to the nearest pumping station, where someone has removed a couple of bricks from the base to allow a steady flow of water to pour out.

A few communities have received help from non-governmental organisations. In the Arjun Nagar slum, a borewell has been drilled down 115 metres by Water Aid to provide water for 100 families, each paying 40 rupees (50p) a month.

Until the well was drilled, Shaheen Anjum, a mother of four, got up at 2.30am each day to fetch water, wheeling a bike with five or six containers strapped to it to the nearest public pipe in the hope of beating the queues. “Often we would get there and the water would not be running,” she said. “It was so tiring: the children were suffering and getting ill because they had to come too. The tankers used to come, but there were so many fights that the driver used to run away.”

Water Aid is working in 17 of the city’s 380 registered slums, providing water and sanitation. “It’s not just Bhopal. This has been a drought year for many districts,” said Suresh Chandra Jaiswal, the technical officer. “Now it has reached a critical stage. We just don’t know any more how long the water will last.”

Fifty years ago, Bhopal had a population of 100,000; today it is 1.8 million and rising. In a good year the city might get more than a metre of rain between July and September, but last year the figure was only 700mm.

Neighbours of the Malviyas cluster around the hole in the street outside the house where Jeevan Malviya lived with his wife, Gyarasi, their son, Raju, 18, and their four other children. It was the evening of 13 May, said Sunita Bai, a female relative: a local man, Dinu, thought that the family had blocked the pipe to stop the water flowing further down the hill.

He and a group of friends slapped Gyarasi, 35; Raju tried to stop him. Someone produced a sword and, a few minutes later, the Malviyas lay dying. “We were too afraid to do anything,” said a woman who gave her name as Shanno. “Dinu didn’t want them to take any water. He wanted it for himself.”

Everyone stood around, looking down at the hole in the ground. The pipe is dry. “It is a terrible thing, that people should be fighting over water,” said Shanno.

Source – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/12/india-water-supply-bhopal

Recent urban health posts to Sanitation Updates news feed

Below are links to recent urban health posts to the Sanitation Updates news feed and the Household Water Treatment Google Group –

Sanitation Updates

– Cambodia: “Floating toilets” offer hope for river communities

– Nepal: Squatter woman sold ornament to construct toilet

– WSSCC Endorses Sanitation as a Human Right

– Africa: Poor sanitation claimed some 780,000 children last year

– ‘Sink Positive’ encourages handwashing, conserves water

– Indonesia: Defecation outside toilets a common sight

Household Water Treatment Google Group

– IFC: Safe Water for All Harnessing the Private Sector to Reach the Underserved, 2009

– Update on Pakistan handwashing study – Difficulties in Maintaining Improved Handwashing Behavior, Karachi, Pakistan

– Efficacy of SODIS in turbid waters

Estimation and Characteristics Urban Street Children in the Republic of Georgia

Don’t Call Me a Street Child: Estimation and Characteristics of Urban Street Children in Georgia, 2009. by Katarzyna Wargan and Larry Dershem. UNICEF and USAID.

The Urban Street Children Study in Georgia, with joint support from USAID and UNICEF, has been carried out by Save the Children in collaboration with a multitude of state, non-governmental and academic actors. The research included four large urban centers in Georgia: Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Rustavi and Batumi1. The locations were determined through discussions with several stakeholders, based on a preliminary street children mapping exercise conducted by Save the Children in 2006. Key informants reported that the highest observed numbers of street children were in these four cities. This study is the first comprehensive assessment of street children ever done in Georgia and sets a unique precedent as few such studies have been carried out anywhere in the world. The research aimed to provide estimated numbers of street children in the four target urban locations and describe their characteristics so that evidence-based policy and programmatic recommendations could be drawn.

Kenya – Survey of school hygiene in Nairobi’s informal settlements

Source: Africa Population and Health Research Working Paper 42, 2008: Determining Appropriate Entry Point for Health Promoting Schools Intervention in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements. Osnat Keidar, Elliot M. Berry, Alex C. Ezeh, Milka Donchin.

“89% of the students do not use soap when washing hands in school and about 40% do not wash hands when out of school, hence the need for an intervention focusing on personal hygiene and healthy nutrition in their schools.”Before enrolling their children to a particular school, parents usually have to consider a number of factors. Quality of education and a school environment that assure the health and safety of the children are normally top on the list.

However, parents in Nairobi slums do not have the luxury of choosing schools based on such considerations. Instead they have to scramble for the little space available in the few schools that serve these communities, regardless of the environment. Out of a desperate need, many children from the slum communities are enrolled in schools where infrastructure is wanting and where poor sanitary and hygiene conditions pose a major health threat. A recent study by Osnat Keidar, Elliot M. Berry, Alex Ezeh and Milka Donchin ttled, “Determining appropriate entry point for health promoting schools intervention in Nairobi’s informal settlements” identified characteristics of school environment that could affect children’s health and academic performance in Korogocho and Viwandani slums of Nairobi, Kenya where APHRC conducts a continuous survey.

Twenty-two primary schools, in these two communities participated in the study. Only three schools reported that they occasionally provide soap for washing hands, a fact that could not be verified because the soap was not available in the three schools during the research visits. When assessing the toilet facilities, the study found that while the recommended ratio of the number of students per toilet is 1:25 for girls and 1:30 for boys, in these schools the ratio was 1:84 for both boys and girls. The situation is aggravated by limited access to water, with about 270 children relying on one tap, against the recommended standard set by Kenya’s Ministry of Education (MoE) of 50 students per tap.

The aim of the study was to assess school health needs and identify an entry point for the implementation of a Health Promoting Schools (HPS) initiative. This is an initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO) that aims to improve the health of school communities and academic performance of students through a comprehensive program that uses a major health need as an entry point for intervention.During the assessment, headteachers as well as school teachers and over one thousand students from classes 5 and 6 were interviewed. Among the schools studied, 16 were informal schools (not run by the government), which were either private (individual owned) or community (community owned). The other six were formal (government) schools. Government schools were observed to have a healthier school profile than private and community informal schools. School health profile comprises of ‘school’s health policies, structure, environment, community involvement, health related programs and topics integrated into the curriculum and extra-curriculum activities.’This finding speaks to the poor infrastructure found in these informal schools, which because of their informal nature are not accountable to government and do not comply with the regulations and standards of operation set by the MoE. However, the existence of these schools is significant as they serve a crucial need in these communities. The teacher student ratio shows that the government schools are overwhelmed. The public schools register a high rate of 53.6 while non-formal schools register 33.9 (community-owned) and 26.5 (private-owned).

Looking at the students’ health behaviors, the researchers found that 89% of the students do not use soap when washing hands in school and about 40% do not wash hands when out of school. There is also a high percentage of students who do not eat breakfast before coming to school (35%) and an almost equally high percentage of students who hardly eat fruits and vegetables. As a result, all those interviewed, head-teachers, students and teachers, unanimously identified a need for an intervention focusing on personal hygiene and healthy nutrition in their schools. Given that children from the slums tend to suffer from common infections such as pneumonia and diarrhea, the study recommends that the Ministry of Education in Kenya and other development partners allocate resources for ‘upgrading infrastructure in informal and formal schools that serve the informal settlements (slums) to enable them meet the national water and sanitation standards.

’Diarrhea cases among students could drastically reduce by ensuring personal hygiene in schools through the provision of soap and training them on hand-washing. Healthy nutrition in such deprived settings can also be promoted through regular and sustainable school feeding programs. Training of teachers on health issues is an important way of promoting health in schools, as it builds the teachers’ capacity to implement programs and to pass the skills they have acquired to the students and community at large. However, teachers from all schools in the study generally reported insufficient level of training on health related issues.Following the study, a “health promoting schools” pilot intervention, informed by the study’s findings and using personal hygiene as an entry point, has been initiated in 11 schools in Korogocho.

“This pilot intervention will hopefully scale up at a later stage, and will not only turn all schools into a safe and healthy environment for our children to grow and learn, but will go a long way in ensuring higher academic achievements,” concludes Osnat Keidar, the lead researcher on the study. Osnat is a visiting scholar at APHRC and the study is part of her PhD dissertation program.

Mauritania – Need for investments in urban water

NOUAKCHOTT, Jul 7 (IPS) – Ndey Sall, a resident of Sixième, one of the poorest suburbs in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, spends the equivalent of a dollar a day on water. That’s almost half of her income – not much left to pay for food, rent, or medicine if a family member falls sick.

Sixième, like many other slums in the capital, has no access to pipe borne water. Water is provided by private operators at great cost. Sall buys water daily from a privately-owned tank not far from her house at a cost of 200 ouguiya per litre.

Sall says she requires around 200 litres a day for cooking, drinking and washing for herself, her husband and their three children. It’s an enormous expense, but typical for Sixième residents, where almost everyone lives below the poverty line of two dollars a day.

“Everything is expensive: rent, cooking oil, transport. Everything is just expensive. I would like to urge the government to either reduce the price of water or increase people’s salaries.”

John Coker, a refugee from Sierra Leone who also lives in Sixième, laments the high cost of water in the slums.

“I buy water every day. I consume five 25-liter containers because this is the worst area of Nouakchott to live in terms of access to clean drinking water. So as you can see, I am spending a lot of money on water and this is affecting my budget greatly, because if you don’t have money and you go to that tap, they will never credit you….that place is cash and carry.”

Private water providers have dug their own wells at the foot of the rocky hills outside the capital. The water is transported in by truck to the slums. In addition to the private water tanks, there are a large number of donkey carts, piled high with plastic jerry cans, that roam the slums selling water door to door.

“I supply residents residents in Sixième a minimum of 75 jerry cans of water a day,” a boy driving the cart told IPS. “Each of the jerry cans contains 50 litres. It is a good business for me because I pay my rent from this job and I also take care of my aging parents. I hope to save enough money for myself to start my own business in future.”

Mauritania is estimated to be 75 percent desert so naturally there are acute problems with supplying water in most parts of the country. The problem in the capital is compounded by increased rural to urban migration, which is putting more pressure on the existing water infrastructure. Tens of thousands of people live in unplanned slums in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott with minimal or basic amenities.

Hadrami Ould Khattri is head of a local NGO which focuses on sustainable water development for the rural and urban poor. He says government needs to overhaul water management and supply in the country.

“We all know that water is life…without water there is no life at all. This has been said and well known. And that is why the government needs to put in place a water policy with the local people and their representative being centre of it all in order to help these poor have access to safe drinking water,” he says.

“We’ve seen that there have been so many tragedies and epidemics and so many people get sick and get water-born diseases from those taps. It has also been noticed at hospitals that when people are diagnosed they discover that the origin of their sickness is normally due to the water they drink.”

Mauritanians are going to the polls to elect a new president on Jul. 18, following a coup in October 2008. Slum dwellers are now challenging political leaders to deliver on their promises of providing clean drinking water in the poor neighbourhoods. Khattri says any new elected president will have to treat the water problem in the slums seriously.

“Government really needs to invest, both in terms of funding water taps in different places and also let local people be involved in the management of that water as well,” he said.

“They also need to work on the (pricing) as well, because it is not fair at all that some of these poor people who are making a thousand times less than the average Mauritanian family pay three times more than what the richer people are paying.”

IPS made several unsuccessful attempts to talk to the Mauritanian government minister responsible for water resources about efforts to provide affordable clean drinking water to the people in the slums.

The ministry of water resources did respond in writing: “The government is concerned about the welfare of everybody in Mauritania including those living in the slums. Work has already begun to get a pipeline built from the Senegal-Mauritania River to ensure the availability of drinking water in Nouakchott and other big cities. This work will complete by 2011,” the statement read.

In the meantime, slum dwellers in the capital will continue to rely on expensive private water providers to access this precious commodity.

Source – IPS News

H1N1 Concerns in Africa’s Informal Settlements

Fewer than ten H1N1 cases are confirmed in Africa, but health experts worry the disease may spread in the continent’s crowded slums.

The World Health Organization has reported that the H1N1 swine flu virus has now sickened just shy of 60,000 people. That’s the number of confirmed cased worldwide. Of those, fewer than 10 are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fears Africa could be hit hard by the pandemic. The CDC watches for new diseases in Africa, and it’s keeping a close eye on the continent’s crowded slums.

Africa’s largest slum is a place called Kibera. More than a million people live in this shantytown on the edge of Kenya’s capital. It’s a sprawling area of open sewers amid a sea of tin roof shacks. Inside one shack, Yunus Mohamed interviews a young mother. Mohamed asks in Swahili if anyone in the household has been sick in the past two weeks. Mohamed is a community interviewer with a program run by the CDC and Kenya’s Medical Research Institute.

There are seven family members at this residence. They live together in two rooms. One of the children has a cough and a fever. Mohamed takes the girl’s temperature. The girl was tested at the hospital. She has a seasonal flu. The program Mohamed works for provides medical care for residents, but he is not here to treat the family’s illnesses. He’s here to collect data to help monitor for new diseases that may be spreading through the community. It would be hard to find worse conditions for good health. There is no running water and few here have access to electricity. The slum is an incubator for illness.

Dr. Robert Breiman heads the CDC’s Global Disease Detection Division in Kenya. Right now, his team is watching closely for swine flu: “In places where people are crowded into cramped quarters, and there are issues of sanitation and hygiene, the potential for a virus to be moved easily from person to person is larger. “

“We’ve even seen evidence of a rise in seasonal influenza which we see every year.It moves through a community like Kibera within weeks instead of months or longer. So if you had some sort of doomsday pathogen that’s particularly harmful introduced into a place like this, the potential to spread to endanger other communities, and it’s one of the reasons we are doing this work in a place like this.”

Now, swine flu has not turned out to be a doomsday pathogen. So far, it has generally caused mild illness around this world. But in Kibera, more than 10 percent of adults are HIV positive.

And Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch says the disease could look very different among those with HIV.: “One reason to be concerned about that is that HIV positive people are at much higher risk of bacterial pneumonia, especially pneumococal pneumonia. Those pneumonias are often secondary complications of influenza infection as well.”

Lipsitch says it’s critical that medical workers keep an eye on how swine flu behaves if it arrives in a place like Kibera. The crowded conditions and poor health services might provide an environment where the virus could mutate in dangerous ways.

“There is definitely concern that this virus could become more virulent. Whether the vulnerable populations will be the locus of that is a complete unknown. I do think that the concern about either to virulence or to drug resistance or both are very serious ones and need to be monitored closely.”

The CDC is monitoring closely for any signs of swine flu. But CDC worker Yunus Mohamed says it can be hard to spot a new disease in a place where every day he sees serious symptoms: “Coughing, difficulties in breathing, pneumonia, diarrhea, yellow fever, yellow eyes, fever.”

Mohamed says swine flu is a serious concern — but in a place where malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS are rampant, it’s just one more disease to worry about.

Source – PRI

IFC – Safe Water for All Harnessing the Private Sector to Reach the Underserved

Safe Water for All Harnessing the Private Sector to Reach the Underserved, 2009. (pdf, 2.5MB)

“In this report, we examine a range of technologies and revenue models intended to increase safe-water access among lower-income populations, with primary attention on East Africa, India, and China as important emerging markets.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
BACKGROUND
SECTOR OVERVIEW
Safe-water access needs to be significantly improved
Waterborne diseases cause significant social and economic burdens
Safe-water technology is effective; so, why isn’t it more widespread?
The safe-water market is growing rapidly
Challenges of safe-water market segments differ significantly
OVERVIEW OF BUSINESS MODELS
Legal structure
Access to financing
Entrepreneurial capacity
Partnerships
Revenue model
FACTORS INFLUENCING SCALE-UP OF SAFE-WATER PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
User awareness, consumer demand, and behavior
Product characteristics
Manufacturing and importation
Distribution Marketing
Financial barriers
GOVERNMENT AND POLICY ISSUES
The role of government in laying the groundwork for investment
The role of the international community in creating standards
ON THE HORIZON
New technologies
New delivery models
New partnerships
RECOMMENDATIONS TO ACCELERATE THE BOP SAFE-WATER MARKET
1. Strengthen the enabling environment
2. Strengthen commercial financial intermediaries.
3. Increase BOP consumer demand for safe-water technologies
4. Increase BOP consumers’ access to credit for water-related borrowing
5. Provide soft and flexible funding to safe-water entrepreneurs.
6. Invest in a portfolio of technologies and business models.
7. Invest as much in the entrepreneur as in the technology.
8. Identify and support enterprises that match products and strategies to the right market segments.
9. Improve technologies and business models through advisory services.
10. Incentivize producers of high-end technologies to target BOP markets.
APPENDIX I: COUNTRY REPORT: KENYA & UGANDA
Key findings:
East Africa
Safe-water sector overview
Case study: Ecotact Ltd. – Kenya
APPENDIX II: COUNTRY REPORT: INDIA
Key findings: India
Safe-water sector overview
Case study: Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and ACCESS
APPENDIX III: COUNTRY REPORT: CHINA
Key findings: China
Safe-water sector overview
Case study: Shangli Solar Cookers
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING