Addressing Climate Change Induced Drinking Water Scarcity in Coastal Bangladesh via 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 increased prevalence of hypertension and pre-eclampsia. Small-scale household-level approaches to water purification is 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 salinization problem. That gap will only grow with climate change.

Against this backdrop, Y-RISE (a global scaling research initiative), and BRAC (the largest NGO in the world) have partnered to develop a financially self-sustaining, scalable solution to provide the region with fresh drinking water for the foreseeable future. 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 will be funded via loans from BRAC’s large microfinance program. We will evaluate the effectiveness and scaling potential of the program using a clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) and track business outcomes, water access, and population health.

If research results look promising, BRAC can cost-effectively scale up this program to reach all 20 million affected people, leveraging its large microfinance network. Expanding access to fresh drinking water through this program can potentially reduce the prevalence of hypertension across coastal areas of Bangladesh by 20 to 40 percent. Hence, a scaled-up version of this program would potentially avert millions of lost DALYs.