Marketing Safe Water to the Base of the Pyramid
A Case Study on a Social Enterprise Approach in Nepal
By Lilian Lehmann
Access to safe water is central in the fight against poverty and to the achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Thus projects and technologies for household water treatment are numerous. This thesis examines the Antenna Technologies Geneva WATASOL approach to safe water through chlorination, and reviews its strategy based on pilots begun in Nepal. These pilots consist of setting up social enterprises to market chlorine to the Base of the Pyramid population. The WATASOL model finds itself at the intersection of several significant trends, both in the private and in the public sectors, toward bottom‐up, financially sustainable interventions seeking to create positive behaviour change.
The pilot projects spearheaded by the two non‐profit organizations ECCA and VSBK in Nepal have shown that the WATASOL chlorine reaches the economic Base of the Pyramid. There is a willingness to pay among consumers and the technology should lend itself well to the creation of a sustainable venture. The option of creating a micro-franchise system around the technology to scale up is examined. While micro-franchising is an appealing possibility, scaling up is currently a premature phase in the case of the social enterprise pilots in Nepal.
Introduction
The staggering figures of deaths due to waterborne diseases – 1’600 per day (Hammond, Koch, and Noguera 2009) ‐ are so large they become, in the infamous words of Stalin, merely a statistic. Children in particular are vulnerable. Around 1.8 million die yearly worldwide from diarrheal causes and chronic diarrhoea in early years contributes to malnutrition, stunting and cognitive impairment (WHO 2007). The sheer number of projects and solutions launched both by the private and the public sector to address the need for clean water are in part a reflection of the immensity of the issue’s proportions and its significance in the overall fight against poverty. Access to safe water is fundamentally in attaining the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in health, gender equality, nutrition and childhood survival. This paper takes one safe water initiative – the Antenna Technologies Geneva (ATG) WATASOL program – and reviews its strategy based on pilots begun in Nepal. Initial reactions to the marketing of the chlorine product and methodology suggest very promising potential for the WATASOL model and its eventual scaling up. More time is required, however, for concrete results on the financial sustainability to emerge before expansion should proceed.
One may well ask, if there are already so many technologies in circulation addressing the safe water issue, why add yet another voice to the profusion of proposed solutions? The reasons are simple. Firstly, the developing world is vastly complex. As the development industry has discovered, the developing world is far from homogenous and many macro‐level approaches to poverty alleviation have been declared failures. The micro, bottom‐up approach is now being advanced as the more effective and sustainable way forward. But even this approach has found its limitations in replication and scaling up. Because of the complex context within any given developing country, it would be naïve to argue that one solution (or even a mere handful of solutions) for providing safe drinking water will succeed globally. Communities have different access to water and water collection habits, thus a variety of safe water approaches are necessary. Secondly, different safe water projects have different goals. Some aim simply at reducing incidences of water‐borne diseases in emergency and monsoon seasons. Others focus on precipitating sustained behavior change. Still others strive for financial profit. While all objectives are interlinked, the context and implementing agency are likely to determine which goal is to be most prominent in a project.
The safe water market of Nepal is not a virgin landscape. Significant resources have been poured into social marketing and advertising of safe water and sanitation practices, including specific products for water purification. Still, success and take‐up has been limited. The introduction of the ATG WATASOL technology currently being piloted in Nepal seeks to build on the progress made by other chlorine products and awareness campaigns while at the same time targeting a market need others have failed to meet. As such, the WATASOL project sits at the intersection of the development sector (seeking to eliminate poverty) and the private sector (seeking to create financial sustainability and eventually financial gain). In order to analyze the WATASOL program’s potential for marketing safe water to the Base of the economic Pyramid (BoP) in Nepal and scaling up, the theoretical and practical background of this project must be understood. Thus in Part I, after a brief description of the ATG’s proposed approach, a literature review will outline where the private sector, the development sector and the emergent fourth hybrid sector find themselves. Tracing the context of Nepal then locates the WATASOL’s approach against this theoretical and cultural backdrop. Part II reviews the preliminary findings of the WATASOL operations through two local implementing partners in Nepal. It begins with a review of the social marketing mix of the WATASOL products and then an analysis of specific questions regarding successful access to the BoP, willingness of customers to pay, and financial sustainability. A final part addresses the question of scaling up, specifically the feasibility and appropriateness of setting up a microfranchise. In closing, the implications of assessment and evaluation are considered as paramount prior to any expansion. These initial pilots have great potential, but time is necessary for their models to mature before scaling can be attempted. While on‐site observational research was conducted in Kathmandu and in two rural districts in the spring of 2009, this paper does not rely on statistical information gathered there. (The projects were still at the very beginning of their pilot phases so this type of information gathering was not possible.) Rather, this paper draws on qualitative interviews with key stakeholders and first‐hand field observations. It seeks to integrate this with trends and lessons from the evolving sectors outlined in the first part, and compares them to findings from similar projects by other agencies in different locations.
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