NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

The United Nations now estimates that 90 percent of the world’s population has access to improved drinking water. But the story of access to safe drinking water is more complex, especially when it comes to the 2.7 billion people who live on less than $2 a day: In developing countries around the world, tens of millions of people rely on water filtration and purification products each year to improve their drinking water in the absence of proper infrastructure providing clean water.

Today, MIT researchers released a new report evaluating household water filters on the market in Ahmedabad, India, where these filters have become ubiquitous in households of all income levels, but aren’t properly meeting the needs of the poor.

The report, “Experimentation in Product Evaluation: Household Water Filters in Ahmedabad, India,” details the second experimental evaluation designed and implemented by the Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE), a program supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and led by a multidisciplinary team of faculty, staff, and students.

Launched at MIT in 2012, CITE is the first-ever program dedicated to developing methods for product evaluation in global development. CITE researchers evaluate products from three perspectives:

• suitability, or how well a product performs its purpose;
• scalability, or how well the product’s supply chain effectively reaches consumers; and
• sustainability, or how well the product is used correctly, consistently, and continuously over time.