‘Pure water’ in Niamey, Niger: the backstory of sachet water in a landscape of waste

Keough, Sara Beth; Youngstedt, Scott M.

doi:10.1017/s0001972017000560

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…In West Africa, sachet water was also driven by additional characteristics such as convenience, ease of chilling, small unit sizes, and successful marketing attempts to link packaged drinking water with higher social status (Stoler et al, 2012), even in low‐income communities with piped water access (Stoler, Tutu, & Winslow, 2015). In Niamey, Niger, wealthy consumers drank sachet water in public spaces both because of convenience and because the disposal of the empty bags signaled their status as those who can afford trash collection (Keough & Youngstedt, 2018). Sometimes it was a matter of convenience; in Indonesia, women said that it was easier to buy bottled water (often as refilled water bottles) when they were busy than to boil it themselves (Nastiti et al, 2017).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Socio‐environmental confounders of safe water interventions

Smiley

Stoler

2020

WIREs Water

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The international development community spends billions of dollars annually on safe drinking water projects globally in low-and middle-income settings. These projects are driven by the World Health Organization's Joint Monitoring Programme metrics that rely on indirect measurements of water insecurity via water source and fetching time, with tacit acknowledgment of price inelasticity. But the success of water interventions, as framed by these metrics, is often tempered by the reality that people do not always use the safest, nearest, or least expensive water source. Drinking water interventions are confounded by diverse social and environmental factors that shape household water seeking behaviors in unexpected or underappreciated ways. These caveats to human water-related behaviors are littered throughout the drinking water literatureoften as an anecdote to a given study's primary findings-and present significant barriers to providing universal safe water as outlined by Sustainable Development Goal 6. We review and categorize these socio-environmental confounders into six themes at multiple scales: social relations, water properties, intermittency, affordability, fetching practices, and physical and mental health. We illustrate how efforts to mitigate drinking water insecurity are complicated by the interaction of these social and physical processes. We highlight emerging metrics that enable a richer assessment of household water insecurity, and emphasize the importance of transdisciplinary approaches to improve the effectiveness of clean water interventions.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Socio‐environmental confounders of safe water interventions

Smiley

Stoler

2020

WIREs Water

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“…Through Winner's lens, we would argue that bottled water is inherently political because its usage can facilitate or preclude individuals or entire groups from enjoying their human right to safe drinking water. As the case of sachet water shows, there are communities where access to this type of packaged liquid is necessary [30][31][32][33] and, often times, the only way in which marginalized populations are able to enjoy their human right to water. The second lens that Winner uses is the case of inherently political technologies, "man-made systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships" ( [29], p. 123).…”

Section: How Is Bottled Water Political?mentioning

confidence: 99%

(Re)theorizing the Politics of Bottled Water: Water Insecurity in the Context of Weak Regulatory Regimes

Pacheco-Vega

2019

Water

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Water insecurity in developing country contexts has frequently led individuals and entire communities to shift their consumptive patterns towards bottled water. Bottled water is sometimes touted as a mechanism to enact the human right to water through distribution across drought-stricken or infrastructure-compromised communities. However, the global bottled water industry is a multi-billion dollar major business. How did we reach a point where the commodification of a human right became not only commonly accepted but even promoted? In this paper, I argue that a discussion of the politics of bottled water necessitates a re-theorization of what constitutes “the political” and how politics affects policy decisions regarding the governance of bottled water. In this article I examine bottled water as a political phenomenon that occurs not in a vacuum but in a poorly regulated context. I explore the role of weakened regulatory regimes and regulatory capture in the emergence, consolidation and, ultimately, supremacy of bottled water over network-distributed, delivered-by-a-public utility tap water. My argument uses a combined framework that interweaves notions of “the political”, ideas on regulatory capture, the concept of “the public”, branding, and regulation theory to retheorize how we conceptualize the politics of bottled water.

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“…But household surveys from Nigeria and Ghana have found sachet water to be preferred by both lower‐income and higher‐income households, depending on the setting. In Niamey, Niger, sachet water is consumed by a mix of social classes but carries the stigma of being associated with poverty . The low cost does drive consumer preference for sachets in many urban contexts, and drinking water security, broadly speaking, has been shown to be very elastic with respect to income.…”

Section: Consumer Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sachet water continues to curry favor with consumers who either seek convenient and quality drinking water or are driven to it by systematic gaps in municipal water supplies. A study of sachet water's backstory in Niamey asserts that the economic value of the sachet is rooted in the label, cooler water temperature, seasonality (i.e., the dry season when water is scarcer), and quality . So both necessity and slick marketing have made sachet water a highly appealing product, but the industry's ability to keep up with demand and grow its market share has been the result of dynamic industry evolution that has allowed leading sachet and plastics manufacturers to scale up, form trade organizations, and successfully lobby against threats to ban bagged water .…”

Section: Consumer Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One small study observed that the majority of households were engaged in any of a wide range of small‐scale water‐dependent occupations across 10 Accra communities and that water‐related occupations sometimes contributed over 80% of household income . There has otherwise been only modest attention to livelihoods from the perspective of workers along the sachet water supply chain …”

Section: Industry Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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From curiosity to commodity: a review of the evolution of sachet drinking water in West Africa

Stoler

2017

WIREs Water

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The private sector continues to play an important role in filling local drinking water supply gaps across the Global South. In West Africa, a perfect storm of rapid population growth, infrastructure mismanagement, and globalization of consumer markets has resulted in the advent of an entire new industry around packaged water, primarily ‘sachet water’ sold in mechanically sealed plastic sleeves. Most local governments and international development agencies have historically perceived sachet water as a passing trend, but it has quickly become a primary drinking water source for the majority of households in many urban areas and continues to spread throughout the region and world. Sachet water is now an important component of regional water security, although with attendant issues related to governance, quality control, environmental pollution, and social justice. This paper reviews the seminal literature on sachet water in West Africa, with particular emphasis on Ghana and Nigeria, where most studies have focused. This review synthesizes governance issues, consumer and industry trends, and the latest on product quality in the literature from 2011 to 2016, with 2010 approximating an inflection point for the modernization of the industry. The ability of many West African nations to achieve universal access to safe drinking water may depend on their willingness to understand and incorporate the sachet water industry into an integrated drinking water platform. WIREs Water 2017, 4:e1206. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1206 This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of Water Human Water > Water Governance

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‘Pure water’ in Niamey, Niger: the backstory of sachet water in a landscape of waste

Cited by 6 publications

References 28 publications

Socio‐environmental confounders of safe water interventions

Socio‐environmental confounders of safe water interventions

(Re)theorizing the Politics of Bottled Water: Water Insecurity in the Context of Weak Regulatory Regimes

From curiosity to commodity: a review of the evolution of sachet drinking water in West Africa

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