What are the causes of poor water quality in Developing Countries?

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When it comes to drinking water today, more people in developing countries depend on bottled water than on tap water, while during early 50's our parents and grandparents used to drink river, well, and rain harvest water. What do you think, what are the main causes of this shift?

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6 Answers

  1. There is an increasing concern of drinking water due to its aesthetic view such as colour, taste and odour as well as increasing knowledge on the effects of poor water quality to health and disease. On the other hand, the existence and marketing of bottled water plays a role. Adverts created by bottled water companies influence people very strongly. The lack of information and transparency of water quality authorities regarding the assurance of water quality also makes the difference.

    More and more people from developing regions travel to developed regions learning the concern, knowledge and transparency of people there with regards to the effects of pollutants. The attitude of water companies and lack of willingness of public to pay for water treatment is like a chicken and egg situation. Companies would not do more to treat as they know public create uproar if water price is raised; and public would not pay for they know water will not be treated any more advance. Even if water treatment is advanced, there is corruption and lack of knowledge or poor practices that would mess up things. The water companies further sub-contract pipe repair and treatment maintenance to companies set-up by people from lower socioeconomic status. As everyone wants to make money, a poor job is done. Scouring or flushing of pipes is not done during re-connection of pipes after a pipe-burst incident. In installation of new pipes, a substandard pipe quality is used to replace the pipe of expected quality in order to increase margin of profit from this work. In addition, people from low and middle-socioeconomic status on the overall are more concerned about survival due to rising cost of living rather than quality of life. To those concerned about quality of life, water is not directly related to quality of life in their eyes.

    However, put aside all this, water in developed countries is not necessarily better than water in developing regions, the main difference is that there is pressure on authorities/companies to provide information to public and provide better treatment. There is a continuous pressure and threat by public to water suppliers/companies and to the authorities in charge. Thus authorities/companies want to convince public by providing information and persistently improving as a sense of responsibility and their own consciousness to do better. It is attitude and culture of both authorities/companies and public that play a role.

    Another important attitude and/or cultural habit of people in developing countries is that they love to follow trends learned from developing countries. When developed countries develop something for use, people in the developing countries want to have it (out of trend!). However, once a habit has begun, they have difficulty to stop it even when the developed countries "no" longer practice or use it upon finding undesired results or upon finding ways to better the practices/technologies.

    In general, people in developing countries take longer time to obtain accurate and credible knowledge, reason that people in developing countries lack reading habits. They obtain knowledge through social media which could be inaccurate or exaggerated or misconstrued knowledge. Hence they take bottled water for granted and do not understand or study the implications of their dependence to bottled water which also has its disadvantages. Once started, hard to stop -- so habitual and trendy. As I have explained, there are myriads of issues. I hope this was informative.

     

  2. In developing countries, the water quality is up to the standards at the outlet of water treatment plant (WWT). Due to the poor condition in distribution system,  such as corrosion, leakage and low pressure, the water quality has become bad.

    How to improve management of water utilities in developing countries?

    The lower tarif or water rate is not reasonable. For poor people in slum, government should provide free water through water points (with metering but no billing). And for customers in middle class or industrial/commerical, their water rate should be higher.

    Corruption is not seldom in water uitilites of developing countries. For example, the pump and automation, the purchsement of water utilities is always higher than other industrial. Please check it in developing countries around world.

    The third one is the pipe/WTP construction. In case poor construction in pipe/WTP, water utilities will endure the problems in many decades (the final solution is not exist, except pipe renewal).

    Just for discussion!

     

     

     

           

     

    2 Comments

    1. The causes of poor of water quality are these:

      1. Shortage of land to build houses,

      2. Littering,

      3. Lifestyle they living,

      4. Overloaded of the system led to no retention time of water to settled,

      5. Too much population led to air pollution, and etc.

  3. In developing countries, water is a different resource than it is in "first world" countries.  Rivers aren't drinking water supplies, they are used to manage waste - people discard refuse and sanitary waste in the river and it magically moves downstream during the next storm event. When people are focused on their basic daily needs and are also receiving aid from others to meet their needs, they aren't going to see the value in creating basic infrastructure and sustainable water quality resource protections - buzzwords that we first worlders casually throw around on a daily basis.  

    Aid groups providing isolated infrastructure and bottled water in developing countries help disincentivize the local citizenry from engaging in the development of widespread infrastructure and waste management and support of long term water quality protection rules and policies. They have clean water.  It comes in bottles.  That allows them to focus on other things... like their next meal, clothing or housing.  More aid needs to be focused on teaching and enabling self-directed improvements rather than providing.  True change has to come from within.  

    In history, there is great wisdom.  It was not that long ago that the U.S. - where we now readily enjoy drinkable, fishable, and swimmable surface waters - lacked widespread infrastructure and had extreme water quality issues (ref. 1934 New Deal that provided millions of citizens with work constructing infrastructure projects  and 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, which was the catalyst for the Environmental Protection Agency to implement water quality regulations).  

     

    This is a current photo from a developing country:

    DR Image.JPG

     

  4. I think that one important factor is increased awareness and sensitivity towards water quality. People are moe aware of the potantial health risk of untreated water so they will turn to bottled water. In addition I would imagine that water quality of wells and rivers could be highly affected by increased human (e.g. industrial) activity. I think other reasons might be related to increased availability of bottled water through marketing and expansion of activities. Increase in available income since the 50s could also play a role.

  5. State/county organs involved in the fight for the protection of water resources either lack the legislation to carry out their mandates or find themselves at odds with other institutions tasked with the same job ( replication of duties). its all a merry go round of bureaucracy with very little active implementation. 

  6. There are a number of factors affecting the availability of water in good quality and quantity,for instance in my country Zambia threats ranging from the predominate use of onsite sanitation facilities precisely the pit latrines, low solid waste management and over abstraction of groundwater through a series of drilling companies with much view of profit making than protecting the resources.