Center for Social Innovation

Living near safe drinking water is not the same as drinking safe water. Some have argued that anything short of pumping it directly to the kitchen won’t have any health benefits. “Even if the water is clean when you get it from the spring, it can become contaminated in storage at home,” says Michael Kremer, Gates Professor of Developing Societies in the economics department at Harvard University. In the first randomized evaluation of the health effects of improving water sources alone, without any simultaneous sanitation changes, Kremer and colleagues found that “clean water does make a difference in terms of reducing diarrhea” despite recontamination on the way to the drinking glass.

Kremer followed a spring protection project in rural western Kenya in 2005. “A typical unprotected spring may be like a mud pit in the dry season and in the wet ... Read more