On Comparative Water Costs for Rich Scots and Poor Africans

I was watching Let’s Dance for Sports Relief at the weekend(1).

In one of the segments on What Your Money Can Help With the report focused on a water purification device for rural African homes.

For £5 you can provide filters and water purification tablets that will last for 3 months(2).

That sounds cheap, and given the transformation that clean water will have on infant mortality, labour productivity and quality of life a fiver sounds like good value.

I wanted to see how that compared to the price I pay for my water.

Water under the Sports Relief scheme cost £20 per year for a household. The Gross Domestic Product of Kenya per capita is approximately £530.  So, roughly, providing water purification kits costs about 3.77% of the average Kenyan’s GDP.

Looking at water rates for Edinburgh where I live I see that the fresh water element is some £182 per annum.  Compared to the UK per capita GDP of £25,066 that’s roughly 0.77%.

Now there are a couple of criticisms you could make about this data.  Mainly, I’m comparing per capital GDP with a charge for water per household and I’ve not commented on the number of people in each household. Secondly, Kenyan GDP per capita includes skilled workers who are plugged into the global economy and living in cities with plumbing and also peasant subsistence farmers living next to a cholera infested well.  I’ll leave it to you to decide if these are such fatal flaws that it renders my commentary below nonsensical.

My first comment is that water purification kits and the water I get in my house aren’t a like for like comparison.  I get unlimited clean water (possibly with added floride) piped to my house.  No one in my household has to spend half a day walking to the well and fetching the water. I don’t have to wait for the purification tablets to work before I can slake my thirst. I can hose down my garden from the same pipe.

In Africa, with a well and water purification kit somebody, almost certainly a woman or a girl, will have to carry 20 or 30 kilos of water once or twice a day from a well to the home.  A pipe full of clean drinking water directly into the home would free the women of the household from some hard physical labour and allow them to take part in the paid economy or in education or just some well-earned goofing off.

My water is better and cheaper and easier.

My second comment is that water purification kits seem an expensive way of providing clean water to Africans.  Given that I can get water for a fraction of a per cent of my countries per capital GDP a system that costs 3 to 4% of GDP seems pricey.  If all of Kenya’s water was provided using these kits it would cost an excess of $0.9bn compared to piping it as we do in Scotland.  Not that Kenya is providing all its water so inefficiently but that’s the kind of difference a change in technology would make.

Clearly, there are difficulties in providing a water network to rural areas.  It’s easy to pipe water to your population when more than half of them live in towns and cities and most of the rest live in large villages.  Less easy if your population is more spread out.  It’s also easier to have a decent network of pipes if you started building it 200 years ago(3) and have centuries of accumulated capital invested in the system.

Thirdly, if I were reliant on foreign charitable aid to buy water purification consumables that (perhaps) I couldn’t produce domestically I might consider that my health, and the health of my children, was on a bit of shuggly peg. There’s no guarantee that the purification kits will turn up next year.

I’m not trying to suggest that buying African farmers water purification kits isn’t a good thing to do. I’m just wondering aloud if it’s the very best way of providing them with clean, safe water in the long term.

(1) I was actually reading Charles Stross novels on my Kindle with the TV on in the background, ut there’s no way I’m admitting to that in public.

(2) these figures are from memory and it’s entirely possible that I misheard or misremembered.

(3) or in Roman times depending on where you live.