targeting water treatment products

Hi all,
Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself in previous comments... My name is Rochelle Rainey, and I work in Washington DC, as a technical advisor on household drinking water for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

One of our main concerns, as a donor with a strong commitment to promoting point of use water treatment, is one that surfaced during this e-conference as well: how to provide an affordable option for better health, when the people who need it most can afford it least?

I appreciated the comments about stigmatizing products by targeting them only to the poor, and stigmatizing poor people by targeting these low-cost products only to them.

My limited understanding of voucher systems is that program administration costs are greater than just providing the product for free. If that were the case, would it still be in the interests of sustainability to try to get some people to pay and some to recieve it in a subsidized way with a voucher? Have any of the participants experimented with these targeted subsidies on a program scale?

I would very much like to hear your thoughts and experiences!

Thanks, Rochelle