User preferences and willingness to pay for safe drinking water: Experimental evidence from rural Tanzania

Abstract

Keywords:Tanzania Water and health Household water treatment and safe storage Point of use Boiling User preferences Willingness to pay a b s t r a c t Almost half of all deaths from drinking microbiologically unsafe water occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. Household water treatment and safe storage (HWTS) systems, when consistently used, can provide safer drinking water and improve health. Social marketing to increase adoption and use of HWTS depends both on the prices of and preferences for these systems. This study included 556 households from rural Tanzania across two low-income districts with low-quality water sources. Over 9 months in 2012 and 2013, we experimentally evaluated consumer preferences for six "low-cost" HWTS options, including boiling, through an ordinal ranking protocol. We estimated consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for these options, using a modified auction. We allowed respondents to pay for the durable HWTS systems with cash, chickens or mobile money; a significant minority chose chickens as payment. Overall, our participants favored boiling, the ceramic pot filter and, where water was turbid, PuR™ (a combined flocculant-disinfectant). The revealed WTP for all products was far below retail prices, indicating that significant scale-up may need significant subsidies. Our work will inform programs and policies aimed at scaling up HWTS to improve the health of resource-constrained communities that must rely on poorquality, and sometimes turbid, drinking water sources.

Assessment of the Feasibility and Acceptability of Using Water Pasteurization Indicators to Increase Access to Safe Drinking Water in the Peruvian Amazon

“…Taste was not cited as a factor affecting the acceptability of a WAPI model in a previous study 30 ; this difference may reflect differences in baseline HWT practices, as taste may be a more salient concern in a population where chlorination is more frequently practiced. Although the taste of boiled water has been compared favorably with that of water treated using other methods, 55 it has still been identified as a barrier to boiling practice, 50 and heating water with herbs, cumin, or other locally acceptable additives has been recommended to improve taste. 50 In our study, adding lemon juice to drinking water and using treated water to making lemonade were culturally accepted practices used to improve the taste of WAPI-treated water.…”

“…For example, in a context with greater turbidity of source water, a WAPI intervention may be less acceptable than treatment methods that reduce turbidity, such as flocculation-disinfection. 55 In addition, we conducted this study during the rainy season, which may have increased reliance on rainwater as a water source and thus increased perceived need to treat source water and acceptability of WAPI use. More frequent use of water boiling during the rainy season has been noted in other parts of Peru.…”

Infrastructure Disruptions: How Instability Breeds Household Vulnerability

“…Similarly, the evidence of high maximum willingness to pay for access to better water and sanitation systems in El Salvador suggests that there is room for profitable private investments (Perez-Pineda & Quintanilla-Armijo, 2013). However, in Tanzania and Bangladesh, even though the population is conscious about the importance of having access to safe water, their willingness to pay stays below the retail price for the tested improvements (Burt et al, 2017;Khan, Brouwer, & Yang, 2014). As mentioned earlier, this is also associated with the issues of consumers not being willing to pay for a service.…”

Mechanisms and efficacy of disinfection in ceramic water filters: A critical review

“…The Ceramics Manufacturing Working Group (CMWG), a long-standing supporter of, and respected authority on CWFs, highlights silver as a key feature of the technology for the purpose of improving microbial disinfection performance and inhibiting bacterial growth along the interior filter barrier (Ceramics Manufacturing Working Group, 2010). Due, in part, to silver's high cost of approximately $3 USD per gram (Argenol Laboratories, 2017), CWFs have been notably more expensive than the financial means of its target market (Burt et al, 2017;Francis, 2015;Luoto et al, 2012), indicating a thorough understanding of its disinfection contribution within a CWF context, as well as its mode of action, is imperative for the field.…”