On Comparative Water Costs for Rich Scots and Poor Africans

[danieldwilliam]

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.

Comments

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

What worries me most is that you were typing this in the bath. Love the new user pic, btw.

I know you've focused on distribution of water here, but what about the source? Is there an unlimited supply of clean water in Kenya? (Well, obviously not, that's part of the problem). Rural water supplies in Scotland (and I guess that's the comparison we should make) tend to come from springs or private supplies. That's the case where you go beyond the public main, and that doesn't go very far out of most villages (I've cleared my share of sceptic tanks).

It's probably easier to hook up your average Scottish cottage to a water supply than it is to stop it being washed away. So I don't think our solution would work in Kenya (as a rule - and there will be exceptions).

So, purifying the water you DO have seems like a pretty sensible measure. Digging more wells would seem to be the obvious measure to go alongside that. My real fear, though, is that there just isn't enough water available to support the populations that are growing there.

You're enough of an SF geek to have heard predictions that the wars of this century will be about water, not oil.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I concur with the assessment that wars will tend to be about water not oil.

If you live in the West or in the parts of the Developing world that successfully develop by the time oil becomes really scarce there are things you can do to preserve your standard of living and your economy.

You can build nukes or renewables. You can run electric trains, buses and cars. You can grow bio-fuels. You can invest in energy efficiency. You can turn coal into petrol.

If you are short of water, and you are rich, again there things you can do. You can build massive nuclear powered de-salination plants. You can buy the water from a damp neighbour and pay to pump it. If you’re prepared to pay the price. You can re-plumb all your cities so they recycle all their water. Worst case, if you have access to the kinds of skills that mean that you’re living in a rich country you can perhaps move to somewhere wetter and just as rich.

Scotland welcomes thirsty Silcon Valley entreprenuers.

Bit more of a problem if you are poor.

Oil you can do without – you’re probably already doing without it and not having oil isn’t going to kill you quickly.

Water, that you can’t do with out.

So I think you have a couple of wars that are about rich-ish countries thinking that bullying their neighbours into selling them water cheaply is cheaper than paying full whack for it and many more wars about desperate people panicking and trying to get access to water to drink this summer. I think many of these wars might be civil wars and look more like riots than wars such as 20th century Western would recognise them.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I overlooked the Food Riots of last summer when I was thinking about this. And I think you're right about these things showing up intitially as riots rather than wars, since the ruling 1% will make sure they have water security, in their compounds.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I think initially as riots around a number of resources(food, energy, jobs, water)possibly badged as riots about "others" with things getting more heated until the crisis becomes acutely existential and semi-organised militia get hold of a bunch of AK-47's.

Water security is easy if you have access to 21st Century technology, energy and you don't have to share with too many people.

If you gave me a four or five million I reckon I could build lovely, moist house in Coober Pedy and if you came to visit you'd never notice the fact that it never ever rained there.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Would you be going underground? Going underground.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Yeah, mostly I think. I think something a bit like the Anakin's house in A New Hope.

Have you ever been to CP? One of the strangest places I've ever been to.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

The pic is my seven legged spider. I drew it myself. I value it at $209.17.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Where do you find spiders with no legs?

Where you left them.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

There are obviously issues with the source.

Difficult to generalise about a whole continent but there are clearly bits of Africa that are pretty arid and which will struggle to provide the amounts of water that a larger, richer, more industrialised community would want if they did things the way we do things.

Cradle to cradle techniques might be the way forward there. There are e.g. factories that use water in their production process that return it cleaner than when it went in.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I suppose there are lessons being learned from the large scale irrigation projects which emptied water supplies and left everyone worse off than before.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I find the Goyder line instructive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goyder_Line

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

As you may be aware I spent more time than is considered decent in rural parts of Australia, including some time Arno Bay (so named because that was the cry whenever a grain ship discovered they were heading there). Big problems with aquifer drawdown and rising salt tables.

Also, big problems with sheep grazing. Their pointy feet break up the very thin and shallow topsoil and turns it to dust that blows away.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think the conclusion I’m trying not to draw based on some limited data mis-heard whilst reading a book is that it would be better if we could build some piece of capital that would clean water for forever and that your typical African peasant could maintain with tools that come readily to hand rather than sending them a bunch of tablets every couple of months until we get bored, forget or have troubles of our own.

Better a solar powered pump with some passive solar sterlisation kits than a ration of tablets.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

And I guess I don't believe in a piece of machinery that will do that - so your solar powered pump gunks up and needs maintained or replaced, while the pills are always going to work.

Of course, when we can send nano-filters and fuel cells, I'm up for that.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I take your point that a machine will need to be maintained or replaced. That's a design challenge - mainly for Africans I'd suggest.

We have machinery in Scotland that provides clean, safe water and that can be maintained by folk who are readily available in Scotland.

So the problem sounds like one of chickens and eggs more than utter impossibility.

The pills will always work so long as either we are prepared to send them or Africans are prepared to spend double or triple what we spend on clean, water.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I was being a bit unfair in assuming that the design work would be done in Europe, and shipped out with lost of stickers saying "Sealed Unit - No User Serviceable Parts Inside".

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Nay - doomed to failure that.

One might want to take some European tech out there and ask them if this works for them but until you do a Hudson Bay Camp Out with it best to approach loading up the machines with kit we designed with caution.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

When ever I've spoken to mum about her experiences of the handiness of Africans I've been impressed by how able they appear to be to create stuff that works that they can fix with whatever comes to hand.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Agreed - I was thinking of past attempts at intervention using tools designed off site, which couldn't be maintained on-site.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I wonder how they will cope with the current fleet of Western cars when they become second hand cars and shipped out to Africa.

Dad somewhere has a couple of videos some rural types in Vietnam (?) and Africa building a bio-gas composter and a village oil refinery.

Both are genius works of applied engineering. The health and safety implications of the oil refinary made me wince.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

incidentally key strenghts of the AK-47 and the Sherman - on-site maintenance.

[andrewducker]

I’m just wondering aloud if it’s the very best way of providing them with clean, safe water in the long term.

I can't think of a better one, at least for the moment. There may be a long term solution, but even then I doubt that there's one for the next 10 years, until we can have robot slaves build water purification plants in each village.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Well, we could divert some small percentage of the funds raised into a water capital infrastructure fund and use the proceeds from that to pay for the water purification plants.

Or we could admit that we are applying a bit of sticking plaster and that if we wanted to solve the problem permanently rather than temporally we're going to have to pony up for some proper capital infrastructure.

Or we could support the building of a co-op water purification pill manufacturing plants through out Africa.

Failing robot slaves in the near term that is.

[andrewducker]

Are water purification plants small enough to distribute them locally to each place they're needed? Alternatively, is the cost of pipes covering all of Africa lower than the current system?

Creating the pills/materials locally does sound like a good idea that at least funnels more money into the country, increases skills, etc.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Good questions, good questions.

Consulting Google I find you can buy electricity-free chemical-free purifications systems for a boat or an RV for about £200. The cartridges are about £60. Or for a home at £1,800, cartridges at £300 and they last for a year. Looking at the specs I think the home sized ones might service an entire hamlet. So, they exist, they are just a little more expensive when bought retail.

I'm not sure if the cost of a full on pipe network would be cheaper than the current system. (Even allowing for the improvements in labour productivity from not having to hump water from the well). Certainly, it’s a huge capital investment and we’ve been building our water network for a couple of hundred years.

I guess my response would be - instead of exporting consumable technology which is the cheapest cost “solution” to an acute problem we ought, if were serious about helping these guys agree to pay to co-develop a permanent solution that is both better and cheaper. Otherwise, we just make them dependent on us and our compassion. Which may not be a great place for them to be in the long term.

So, get them involved in the design so they can manufacture, service and repair as much as possible and try and locate the

At the foundation of my unease is this.

With a difference in cost between the system we build for ourselves and the system we provide to them of a couple or three % we’re either looping a chuck of Western charity into the pockets of our own firms or we’re asking Africa to pay a clean water tax of 1-2% to us. And that situation would continue until Africa (or parts of it) is rich enough to build their own systems that are better / cheaper than the ones we’re offering.

Or

If tablets really are the best solution we can offer them for the foreseeable future how do they grow their economy to the point that they don’t need charity if they have to pay that much for water.

Imagine what would happen to the UK economy if our water rates went up fourfold. £800 for a Band D house, £1,500 for a Band H – just for the water.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, I think you're looking at this from a "long-term, what would be best for them" point of view, rather than a "What would be a cheap fix that we can afford on tiny aid budgets" point of view.

I can't see that getting very far :->

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think you have correctly diagnosed my difficulty here.