1: Household Water Treatment and Storage: What can the poor afford?

Treatment and safe storage of household drinking water is a practice that can reduce incidence of diarrhea by over 30 percent. Yet many people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water in the home. And many poor people do not even have an extra bucket in which to separate drinking water from water for other uses. Although a range of technologies exist to treat unsafe water—many that are low cost—a majority of people do not have access to one, let alone a choice of options to treat and store their water safely. Thus, some of the key questions of this theme revolve around:

What strategies exist that promote household water treatment and storage?

What value do people see in treating and storing water safely so that they sustain the practice over the long term?

How can we magnify the savings from treating and storing water safely so that the investment seems worth the cost and effort to households?

What schemes exist that encourage small business investment into water treatment and storage?

What different payment methods might make these products more affordable or desirable to customers?