Addressing Climate Change-Induced Drinking Water Scarcity in Coastal Bangladesh through Water Entrepreneurship

Climate change-induced saltwater intrusion has created a critical shortage of clean drinking water for 20 million people in coastal Bangladesh. Salinity in drinking water has led to an increased prevalence of hypertension and pre-eclampsia. Small-scale household-level approaches to water purification are popular in the development economics literature, but these rely heavily on external subsidies and are unlikely to be either scalable or financially sustainable given the massive scale of the salinization problem. This gap will only grow with climate change over time. Against this backdrop, the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation & Scale (Y-RISE) and BRAC have partnered to develop a financially self-sustaining, scalable solution to provide the region with fresh drinking water for the foreseeable future, and researchers are evaluating the effectiveness and scaling potential of the program for business outcomes, water access, population health, and socioeconomic outcomes. The centerpiece of this solution is to identify, fund, and support “water entrepreneurs” in coastal Bangladesh who will desalinate and then distribute clean drinking water to households. Water entrepreneurs are funded via loans from BRAC’s large microfinance program.