Design for sustainable development—Household drinking water filter for arsenic and pathogen treatment in Nepal

In the last 20 years, the widespread adoption of shallow tubewells in Nepal Terai region enabled substantial improvement in access to water, but recent national water quality testing showed that 3% of these sources contain arsenic above the Nepali interim guideline of 50 microg/L, and up to 60% contain unsafe microbial contamination. To combat this crisis, MIT, ENPHO and CAWST together researched, developed and implemented a household water treatment technology by applying an iterative, learning development framework. A pilot study comparing 3 technologies against technical, social, and economic criteria showed that the Kanchan Arsenic Filter (KAF) is the most promising technology for Nepal. A two-year technical and social evaluation of over 1000 KAFs deployed in rural villages of Nepal determined that the KAF typically removes 85-90% arsenic, 90-95% iron, 80-95% turbidity, and 85-99% total coliforms. Then 83% of the households continued to use the filter after 1 year, mainly motivated by the clean appearance, improved taste, and reduced odour of the filtered water, as compared to the original water source. Although over 5,000 filters have been implemented in Nepal by January 2007, further research rooted in sustainable development is necessary to understand the technology diffusion and scale-up process, in order to expand access to safe water in the country and beyond.