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Safe Water & Sanitation

Every year, over 1.8 million children die from diseases caused by contaminated water and poor sanitation. Pathogenic bacteria and heavy metal contaminants are the primary types of water contamination problems, each with their own challenges.


These types of water-related illnesses are a huge barrier to progress in health, education, and economic growth. Women and children spend large amounts of time fetching water far from their homes. Sick and malnourished children miss school and learning opportunities, while parents forgo income generation in order to care for them. The poorest of the poor are not able to achieve better livelihoods if their basic needs are not met.

contaminated well"Diarrhea, which is spread easily in an environment of poor hygiene and inadequate sanitation, kills about 2.2 million people each year, most of them children under five" -UNICEF

Among the promising approaches is the development and dissemination of point of use (POU) treatment technologies. But while multiple safe water technologies are being developed, the challenge has been to develop strategies that lead to widescale adoption and promote their use. Global progress towards the Millennium Development Goal to halve the number of people without access to safe water and sanitation by 2015 has prompted key questions such as the following to be asked and investigated.(Above: Red paint indicates that this tubewell is contaminated with high levels of arsenic, Jessore District, Bangladesh. Credit: Susan Amrose)

  1. How does one determine which small-scale water treatment technologies and sanitation methods are appropriate for a specific community?

  2. How do social marketing methods and education strategies affect adoption, willingness to pay, and sustainable use of safe water technologies?

  3. What are the long-term health and economic effects of water and sanitation interventions in developing countries?
  4. How does one disseminate and scale up successful safe water technologies?

    Water Survey

(Above: Village children watch as Berkeley graduate student Susan Amrose performs experiments with ARUBA in Jessore District, Bangladesh. Credit: Johanna Mathieu)

Safe Water & Sanitation Initiative

This initiative is a portfolio of several projects focused on designing new and appropriate technologies for water disinfection at the point-of-use (POU), developing marketing and implementation models for their sustainable dissemination, and creating rigorous needs assessment tools, education materials, and evaluation methodologies.

Arsenic Removal Using Bottom Ash (ARUBA)

The aim of this project is to design a device and/or process that utilizes bottom ash to effectively remove arsenic from drinking water.

Electro-Chemical Arsenic Remediation

This innovation uses a technology deigned to remove high amounts of arsenic from groundwater using only a bit of iron and a very small amount of electricity as inputs.