Education Sector Responses to the Health and Nutrition of Schoolchildren
113
Box 3.4
Kenya’s Innovative Way to Provide Safe Drinking Water to Schoolchildren* In November 2009, the Ministry of Education (MoE) of Kenya launched an innovative program to cost-effectively bring safe water to 33 primary schools in western Kenya. Contaminated water can spread a range of diseases, including cholera. Treating water with a small amount of dilute chlorine solution kills most diarrheacausing organisms. Kenya’s Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation typically distributes free chlorine in response to cholera outbreaks, but there is no regular distribution. Chlorine products are available commercially (for example, WaterGuard), but such products are purchased by fewer than 10 percent of households in the region and by very few schools in Kenya. The products are expensive because the low cost of chlorine is greatly exceeded by the costs of packaging and distributing it for individual sale. The new MoE program provides dilute chlorine in bulk, via a convenient valvecontrolled dispenser next to a school-based water source. Using the schoolbased management system, the MoE has provided funding for drinking water stations (comprising a water storage container, spigot, and stand) so that students can drink treated water from these containers, rather than untreated water directly from the source. The cost of providing chlorine in this way is expected to be only one-quarter to one-half the cost of chlorine sold via more traditional retail distribution systems. The MoE has selected schools with water sources that are used by both the school and members of the surrounding community, and has accordingly promoted dispenser use by the student population and nearby households. The dispensers now installed at 33 schools are expected to serve more than 24,000 students and more than 2,200 households. At scale, costs of manufacturing and delivering dispensers and chlorine refills could be as low as $0.15 per person per year. The estimated cost per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) saved is under $20, comparable to vaccines. The program was implemented with technical assistance from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), the NGO that developed the dispenser. * Contributed by Michael Kremer, Amrita Ahuja, and Jeff Berens.