Commentary: Gates Foundation grant to PATH
This weekend, two articles in the Seattle Times and the Seattle PI caught my attention. Both were covering a recent $17 million Gates Foundation grant for developing new water treatment technologies for the developing world. In the past few years, the focus on new water treatment technologies has increased as knowledge of the global water crisis has gained more attention, and also as people have become more frustrated with the failures in the public sector to address this issue.
Original article in Seattle Times
I applaud the new Gates Foundation interest in this area and PATH’s track record in making technologies accessible to the poor. However, new technologies by themselves will have little impact on the goal to “ensure sustainable access to safe and affordable drinking water for the poor.”
The basic problem is convenient access to water and latrines. Women and children all over the world spend their days collecting water, and they can’t carry home enough water to meet their most basic needs for drinking, bathing, and hand-washing. Without safe sanitation, people defecate in the open, creating an extremely unhygienic and hazardous environment for the entire family and undermining human dignity.
For millions of girls from poor households, there is a straight trade-off between time spent in school and time spent collecting water. For their mothers, time spent collecting water means they have little time for more productive work or rest. To solve this problem, the journey to collect water must be eliminated and every person needs access to a proper latrine.
There is definitely a role for household level treatment, but I don’t think it should be done in the absence of an overall public health approach that includes access to water, latrines, and hygiene education. From what I’ve seen, simple chlorine is used well at the household level (no need for a new invention) when this integrated approach is used. Moreover, I don’t think individual point-of-use treatment is a cost-effective long-term solution. Although 8-cents to treat 3 gallons of water sounds cheap, it’s not. It’s 5 times more than what my family pays for water from Seattle Public Utilities delivered right to our home taps – no carrying water! To provide the World Health Organization recommended bare minimum of 5 gallons per person, a family of 5 will spend about 70-cents per day on treating water. That’s too expensive for the one billion people on Earth that live on less than $1 per day.
Marla