Technology in Water and Agriculture

Income Generation from Water Purification - Technology in Water and Agriculture

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

Hi, my name is Amy Lynn [sp?]. I'm a SAIS student. I was interested in Mr. Allgood's presentation on the PUR product, and especially the component of income generation combining, providing an income-generation source for local women to sell that product in communities. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how that has worked, whether different pricing has to be established for different types of income levels in different communities, and what kind of volume of packets has really been able to be distributed, especially since there may be resistance from local communities to pay for water if they can have it for free.

The last part was the volumes, you said?

Well, I was wondering about both volumes, and also social acceptance of the concept of paying for these packets, especially if you're giving it away for free in other circumstances.

Yep, so, the way the pricing works, is that we make it for about three and a half pennies per packet. So each packet treats ten liters. And then it has to be imported, that usually costs about half a penny. Sometimes there are duties and tariffs. So typically it takes no more than five cents to get it into a country, and then it's sold, anywhere from seven to thirteen cents depending on what the duties are. So, you can say an average of about ten pennies per packet, and each packet treats ten litres. Places like I mentioned in my presentation, Jimima Oto [sp?]and her group, Safe Water and AIDS Program in Africa, they've been selling it for six years now. And every year, it's one of the top things that they sell, by volume. However, I can tell you that, in places where we've tried where that's all they sell, it hasn't worked. So they sell other water treatment products, like Aquatabs and bleach. They sell bed mats, they sell protein supplements, a number of health products for people living with AIDS. But that market basket of things that they sell seems to work pretty well. In places like Congo, we've seen most of the Pure that we've provided in Congo has been sold, through PSI and then commercial distributors. In other countries, like Ethiopia, most of it's been provided for free, even though the amounts that are also sold there are more than a million packets a year. Social marketing is tough, I mean getting people to change habits, and the different things it takes to get it accepted are difficult to learn. I mean, even in the U.S., people who've had a heart attack, only fifty percent of people take their medications prescribed by a physician, so to get someone to do a health prevention habit in the developing world, people live on a dollar a day, is tough. So we're learning, things like the school program and clinics. And we're also learning, I'm going to keep learning, we're going to do price subsidy tests and look at what happens, comparing free to subsidized product to full-cost recovery and see if there's an inflection point that you get higher volumes.