Bringing the consumer to the table: A research tool for assessing consumer erceptions & practice of household water treatment methods

Background

Household water treatment and safe storage interventions are clearly an effective strategy for achieving child health objectives. An analysis of 21 controlled field trials related to household water treatment and storage showed a 42% reduction in diarrhea, compared with control groups (Clasen and Cairncross 2004). Not only are these interventions effective, but they have been shown to be highly cost effective.

Problem

To reduce diarrheal disease from water contamination and to achieve public health impact, water treatment methods must inactivate pathogens that cause diarrhea. But they must also be easy to use and affordable to householders, and practiced consistently and correctly. Incorporating consumer perception and practice into household water treatment strategies is vital to creating effective and sustainable programs, and to assure the adoption of household water treatment and storage methods.

Methods

To explore consumer perception and practice in the home, USAID's Hygiene Improvement Project, together with UNICEF/Nepal and national counterparts, developed a research tool for program design. The tool guides planners to examine consumer perceptions of various water treatment methods over time (as designed, over a one month trial period). It looks at consumer reaction to various methods (bleach, filters, boiling, solar) across a set of characteristics identified by households as most critical to the use of methods – taste, color, effort, family reaction, etc.

The tool also measures consumer success in treating water in the home by measuring contamination at three points in time. Lastly, the tool uses a negotiation technique, which invites participants to identify solutions to reduce barriers to using methods.

Findings and Conclusions

Consumers had clear preferences for household water treatment, with implications for the re-design of methods to promote water treatment. Findings also showed huge gaps from lab to backyard in method effectiveness. These findings provide critical input to developing a water treatment marketing strategy, as is being done currently in Nepal, and which are applicable to many other program contexts.

There is still a programming gap between this evidence base and the programmatic approaches of major donors and implementers. This must be effectively shared with decision-makers to assure more funding and emphasis on safe water as an essential component of child health programming.