Introducing safe drinking water to women self-help groups in India

AED/POUZN's project is promoting multiple POU options to 1.185 million people in and around Uttar Pradesh, India. The project's goal is to obtain 40% urban and 30% rural point-of-use (POU) water disinfection adoption. POU methods include boiling, solar disinfection, chlorine and filters. to convert 92% of 15,000 urban SHG members and 72% of 105,000 rural SHG members to use a POU product. POUZN co-designed the project with its partners: NGOs, the commercial sector, micro-credit institutions and women self-help groups (SHGs). The pilot project dramatically increased water disinfection and enabled the private sector to reach a new market, giving families increased access to lifesaving health products. This is the first project to offer commercial water filters to lower income consumers via the use of micro-credit. Evaluation was done by a pre-/post-intervention quantitative surveys, behavioral surveys, sales reports and in-depth interviews with NGO partners to address their concerns with long-term sustainability. POUZN has obtained 28% adoption rate for POU methods with the first 384,000 community members contacted, Since then, the project has increased the POU uptake rate by fine-tuning its approach. Interestingly, the urban poor, among whom filters have a much higher aspirational value, quickly accepted that their water was impure and adopted technologies, while the rural poor needed more proof that their water was contaminated, such as multi-point water tests, which demonstrated that their water at POU was unclean.

Leveraging the contacts of local NGOs has allowed for POUZN to successfully take the POU intervention to scale.