Drinkwell: Making safe water accessible

Anand Laishram *

This week let's learn about Drinkwell, a company started in Bangladesh, to make safe water accessible to the public. Drinkwell is a very powerful example of Market Creating Innovation in action. We will be focusing more on Drinkwell's business model, rather than their technology.

The case of Drinkwell demonstrates the need to package technological innovation in the appropriate business model, in order to effectively serve the target market. The target market in this case is the Bangladeshi public who have been affected by unsafe drinking water for decades.

Due to biological contamination of freshwater sources such as rivers and lakes, people were advised to switch to groundwater. Unfortunately for the people of Bangladesh, the groundwater sources were also found to be contaminated, with arsenic in this case.

Many people suffered because of using contaminated water. Many people lost their lives or suffered from various health problems as a result. It is estimated that up to 77 million people had been exposed to arsenic laden water.

It was with the goal of solving this issue, of lack of access to safe water, that Minhaj Chowdhury returned to Bangladesh from the USA, to start Drinkwell in 2013. He teamed up with Dr Arup Sengupta. Dr Sengupta had developed a new and reusable arsenic filtration system.

But technological innovation was only half of the battle. In order to utilize technological innovation effectively and make safe water available to the public, an innovative business model was required. Even though the technology had been developed, the bar-riers to consumption (Affordability, Accessibility, Time and Expertise) also had to be broken down.

Here's how Drinkwell tackled this issue:
- They sold the filtration systems to water entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs had the ambition of supplying their local communities with safe water and also earn income out of it.

By selling the filtration systems to these entrepreneurs, Drinkwell could reach a lot of communities, all over Bangladesh.

- The water entrepreneurs would build "Water ATMs", small kiosks for dispensing safe, arsenic free water, at afford-able rates.

Customers can get water at $0.09 to $0.14 per litre, from these Water ATMs. They could pay for the water by the means of payment cards. Customers would deposit money into these cards, and then swipe them to buy water. This made for a very simple and easy system for the customers. - Drinkwell also charged the entrepreneurs a monthly fee, in order to take care of their maintenance and repair requirements.

This simple system allowed Drinkwell and their Water ATMs to take off. Drinkwell has opened more than 200 Water ATMS across Bangladesh till date and provides safe water to more than 2000 households.

Drinkwell has also expanded to other countries like India, Cambodia and Laos. The WHO estimates that about 200 million people around the globe are exposed to arsenic contaminated water. In a world of rapidly growing population and rapidly dwindling water resources, we need sustainable, market-based solutions to help ensure that clean and safe water is affordable and accessible to all.

Drinkwell's system might be one of those solutions that needs to be rolled out on a larger scale.