Eliciting Willingness-To-Pay for Point-of-Source In-Line Chlorinators in Low Income Areas of Urban Dhaka

This project proposes estimating the willingness-to-pay for a novel water treatment device that is attached to a hand pump that draws water from the public water supply network. The water supply is often contaminated with impurity and pathogens and causes common water-borne diseases. The device will treat water through a pre-specified amount of chlorine as the water flows out of the pump. The device uses simple techniques and does not require any moving parts or electronics. The automatic In-Line Chlorinator is a novel innovation (designed and developed by Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University with local partnership of icddr,b in Bangladesh) and this project will contribute towards measuring WTPs for such devices at the compound level. The community level point-of-source water treatment devices have not been studied before. Both technical and social innovations of the device and a demand side analysis of the product will contribute towards designing a sustainable business model, which will enable a thorough and larger research design when the intervention is eventually scaled up.