Population growth in West Africa has outpaced local efforts to expand potable water services, and private sector sale of packaged drinking water has filled an important gap in household water security. Consumption of drinking water packaged in plastic sachets has soared in West Africa over the last decade, but the long-term implications of these changing consumption patterns remain unclear and unstudied. There has been little research into the transformation of drinking water delivery in developing urban centers such as Accra, and, to our knowledge, no published literature exploring how privatized, packaged water such as sachets is changing the drinking water landscape in West Africa.
This article reviews recent shifts in drinking water, drawing upon data from the 2003 and 2008 Demographic and Health Surveys, and provides an overview of the history, economics, quality, and regulation of sachet water in Ghana’s Accra-Tema Metropolitan Area (ATMA). This paper profiles the growth of sachet water in Ghana’s capital region, the ATMA, based on in-depth structured interviews with sachet producers, trade groups, and government agencies. Accra, Aug. 17, GNA - Voltic Ghana Limited has reiterated its commitment to offer quality mineral water to consumers.
The company said it would continue to adhere to best manufacturing processes and standards to maintain its top notch quality for consumer satisfaction. The tour was to solidify the relationship with the media and deepen stakeholder confidence in the company's operations. Mr Philip Redman, the General Manager of the company, gave the assurance at a media tour of its new plant at Akwadum near Nsawam in the Eastern Region.
'We will never compromise on quality as we have the health and satisfaction of our customers at heart.
Contamination of sachet water: FDA cautions against unregistered product on market | Citi Newsroom
The Rise of Sachet Water in Ghana
Despite substantial progress toward the Millennium Development Goals’ target of halving the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, nearly a billion (109) people still lack safe sources of drinking water, over a third of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa (United Nations 2008). Many sub-Saharan African cities have surged in population in recent decades due to industrialization-driven urbanization coupled with high (though declining) fertility (Bloom et al. 2008), and projections for the next decade yield an urban-majority population for the region (United Nations 2010). Indeed, Ghana passed that threshold in 2011.
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In the face of such rapid and unprecedented urbanization, many governments have been unable to extend basic water and sanitation services to keep up with urban population growth, and informal settlements and slums have become a fixture in sub-Saharan Africa’s urban landscape. The inadequate investment in water infrastructure over the past few decades has restricted - or even eliminated - piped water access for an increasingly large fraction of the urban population. This water scarcity results in further marginalization of living conditions and generates high levels of morbidity, particularly in the most densely populated, and generally poorest urban areas (UN-HABITAT 2006; Gaisie & Gyau-Boakye 2007).
Although GWCL’s service coverage is technically 80% of the ATMA, less than half of residents have a house or yard connection (Van-Rooijen et al. 2008), and less than 10% have a reliable in-house connection. Most people are dependent upon water vendors when lacking a nearby connection or when rationing diverts water to higher-income neighborhoods. In Accra, where residents are already paying four times as much for water by volume than New Yorkers, slum residents are paying vendors up to eight times the local public utility prices (United Nations Development Programme 2006), and up to twenty times in dryer periods (Taylor et al. 2002). Barriers to connecting to the water network, such as high capital costs and lack of property rights in informal settlements, exacerbate inequalities in water network access between high- and low-income settlements (Collignon & Vézina 2000).
Where lack of infrastructure and/or rationing have left a void, entrepreneurial water vendors have stepped in to sell water in three general delivery modes: (1) by the tank, via trucked supplies, (2) by the container, straight from the vendor’s own tap water supplied by GWCL, or less commonly (in Accra) from a borehole, and (3) packaged as sachets with varying degrees of filtration or disinfection. Sachet water typically consists of 500 mL polyethylene plastic bags of water heat-sealed on either end (see Figure 1a). It is a relatively new and fast-growing source of drinking water in Ghana and other West African nations.
Popularly referred to as ‘pure water,’ sachets have gained public affinity due to low price, convenience, ubiquity, and the public perception that sachet water is of higher quality than tap water. Sachets are also notorious for constituting a major proportion of the plastic waste generated throughout the country, as consumers typically litter the plastic sleeves in streets and gutters due to lack of organized solid waste collection and removal. Clogged gutters increase the chance of flooding during the rainy seasons, which leads to subsequent loss of property and localized bouts of waterborne illness.
The word sachet itself does not appear in the United Nations’ recent 440-page Human Development Report focusing on global water crises (United Nations Development Programme 2006). Ghana’s shift toward privatized water delivery, while not thoroughly studied, was recognized by Ghana Statistical Service as it prepared for the 2010 Ghanaian Census.
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Water vending has probably existed as long as society itself, and the issues surrounding vended water in the developing world have received contemporary review elsewhere (Sansom 2004; Kjellén & McGranahan 2006). In urban sub-Saharan Africa, citizens lacking piped potable water have traditionally relied on both formal and informal versions of water kiosks, from which water is carried back to the home, and pushcart (or donkeycart, etc.) vendors who deliver water to communities and businesses.
Sachet Water in Accra
History of Sachet Water
The brief history of sachet water which follows was pieced together through interviews with sachet producers, an official at the Ghana Plastic Manufacturers Association, and GWCL officials. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was common to be able to buy a cup of drinking water on the streets of Accra for 1 Ghana pesewa (100 Ghana pesewas [Gp] = 1 Ghana cedi [GH¢]). The purchaser drank directly from a plastic or metal cup, which the vendor used to scoop water out of a larger storage vessel. This form of water entrepreneurship was aimed at poor, transient population segments, but eventually demand grew beyond this demographic.
Increased demand coupled with the obvious sanitary shortcomings of such a system led to the packaging of water in small plastic bags in the 1990s. These small bags, tied by the corners at the top, generally cost Gp 1-3 for a bag containing 250-500 mL of water (generally municipal water). Hygiene remained an issue, as bags were generally filled by women and children with suspect sanitary practices (Olayemi 1999; Obiri-Danso et al. 2003). In the late 1990s, new Chinese machinery that heat-sealed water in a plastic sleeve effectively created the modern sachet that is currently sold on the streets of several West African nations.
The price of a sachet in Ghana held steady at Gp 3 for many years until the redenomination of the Ghana cedi in 2007, which essentially knocked four zeros off the old cedis using a ratio of 1:10,000. Due to the shift to the new currency, receiving exact change from purchases became problematic - a situation common to much of the developing world - and the effective street price rose by two-thirds to Gp 5 where it remains today. A new ad valorum tax on sachet water was set to take effect in March 2010 in order to fund the cleanup of drains clogged by discarded sachet sleeves, but the tax was repealed by Parliament at the last minute due to concerns over civil hardship. The street price of sachets would have risen from Gp 5 to 7, but would have effectively gone to Gp 10 in most areas due to vendors’ lack of change. The environmental impact of sachets has yet to be addressed as of this writing, but recent proposals have included the taxation of imported plastic used to manufacture sachet sleeves, and the development of biodegradable sachet packaging.
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The appeal of the sachet seems to mirror the mass consumer appeal of small unit sizes of commodities as seen elsewhere in the developing world (Hammond & Prahalad 2004). In Ghana, where many people are living day-to-day, average household budgetary constraints often preclude the purchase of larger volumes of consumer goods such as grains, spices, and milk, and immediate needs may override the cost savings of buying in bulk. Eating meals out of the home and take-away culture is increasingly popular, and sachets can be consumed on-the-go with less concern over quality relative to tap water.
Percentages of households using piped drinking water vs. sachet/other water as the primary source of drinking water by DHS survey year for Ghana’s ten administrative Regions.
Recent Trends in Sachet Consumption
Recent Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in Ghana reveal the surge in sachet consumption, but the international water and sanitation community has thus far taken relatively little notice. Among Ghana’s ten administrative Regions, all generally show neutral or slightly positive trajectories in the percentage of households using piped drinking water except Greater Accra, which decreased from 84.4 to 58.2%. Filling this gap, the percentage of households primarily drinking from sachets grew to 34.5% in 2008, considerably higher than any of the other nine Regions.
The Greater Accra Region had the fastest growing population in the country, growing at 4.4% annually between 1984 and 2000, and the intermittency of water delivery may be attributable both to this growth and an inadequate water infrastructure investment (Gaisie & Gyau-Boakye 2007). We observe the largest increases in sachet use around several low-income neighborhoods such as Nima, Kokomlemle, northern Kanda Estates (within the otherwise well-served Cantonments), Teshie Nungua Estates, and the predominantly Ga coastal strip from Gbegbeyise to Jamestown. Only the up-and-coming middle-class neighborhood of Dansoman yielded less sachet use in 2008 than in 2003.
Households were increasingly able to procure water within 15 min from home in 2008, and the median time to that water source decreased from 5 to 1 min for urban residents as sachet use increased from 5.7 to 37%. The surge in sachet use reported between the 2003 and 2008 DHS, as the novel product initially gained popularity with consumers, seems to be linked not only to convenience but in those surveys is associated with those with higher disposable income.
While additional nationally-representative data from 2006 also demonstrate that early-adopters of sachet water tended to be wealthier (Ghana Statistical Service 2006, p. 53), more recent survey data reveal that sachet consumption may be more closely linked with the urban poor. Fifty percent of households in a sample of Accra’s slum neighborhoods reported using sachets as their primary drinking water source in a 2009-2010 study, and these households tended to be the poorest within these slum communities (Stoler et al.
Table 1 also indicates that bottled water and tanker truck delivery, which primarily enjoy a niche market among wealthy Ghanaians, continue to play a relatively insignificant role in drinking water delivery across Greater Accra. Bottled water is commonly available through street vendors and markets that cater to the rich, but it lacks broader appeal due to higher price and the ubiquity of sachet water of equal quality from the same bottlers.
While the booming sachet water industry diverts an unknown quantity of water from the municipal system, often depriving or limiting access of those further down the network, it effectively extends improved water coverage deeper into informal settlements and slums, and alleviates the need in those places for a method of safely storing drinking water. The deterioration in water quality from source to storage container in the developing world is well-documented (Wright et al. 2004), as are the associated adverse health outcomes (Gundry et al. 2004). Recent work in Accra has shown that the use of sachet water by low-income households may provide an inadvertent health advantage over stored tap water despite the higher cost of sachet water and general health disadvantages associated with poverty (Stoler et al. 2012).
| Drinking Water Source | Urban 2003 (%) | Urban 2008 (%) | Rural 2003 (%) | Rural 2008 (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Piped into dwelling | 34.8 | 22.4 | 3.2 | 3.0 |
| Piped to yard/plot | 31.1 | 21.2 | 6.4 | 6.0 |
| Public tap/standpipe | 22.8 | 13.2 | 14.3 | 14.1 |
| Sachet water | 5.7 | 37.0 | 0.3 | 1.7 |
| Bottled water | 2.1 | 2.9 | 0.1 | 0.2 |
| Tanker truck | 1.2 | 0.7 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
Breakdown of Drinking Water Sources in Greater Accra (2003-2008)
Circular Economy and Sustainability
Amid growing environmental pressures on firms, this research emphasizes the importance of aligning economic efficiency with environmental stewardship to meet societal needs. The study reveals a positive and significant relationship between circular economy practices and corporate profitability, demonstrating that process innovation enhances these benefits by providing a competitive advantage. Additionally, the mediation analysis confirms that process innovation is a crucial intermediary, amplifying the profitability gains from circular economy initiatives. These findings underscore the economic viability of sustainable business models, offering empirical support for corporate decision-makers, investors, and policymakers to integrate circular economy principles with strategic innovation.
Circular economy, grounded in the principles of recycling, reducing, and reusing, offers an alternative to the traditional linear economy model of production-consumption-disposal, enabling the reduction of resource use and waste production. Consequently, circular economy has garnered significant interest from both academics and practitioners and has begun to be incorporated into the corporate social responsibility agendas of firms worldwide. At the firm level, this new perspective primarily involves implementing waste management, reduction, and recycling practices to meet environmental requirements and customer expectations.
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015) aim to engage supply chain stakeholders in environmentally friendly practices. However, firms face challenges transitioning to a circular economy due to resource limitations (Rodríguez-Espíndola et al., 2022). To succeed in a circular economy, companies need to innovate their business models (van Renswoude et al., 2015). Finding solutions for the negative impacts of economic activities has become a global priority, leading to a shift towards sustainable development (Johnson & Wilson, 1999) to prevent resource depletion (UN, 2015).
Process innovation has consistently attracted attention from the business sector due to increasing environmental concerns (Abdullah, Zailani, Iranmanesh, & Jayaraman, 2016). Manufacturing firms, particularly those in highly polluting industries, have a crucial role in environmental protection. Process innovation involves the creation of new ideas, products, services, processes, or management systems aimed at addressing environmental issues (Rennings, 2000). Companies adopting circular economy principles often achieve enhanced financial performance, including cost savings and improved market access due to sustainability advantages Geissdoerfer et al., 2017).
A circular economy prioritizes greater resource usage and offers a circular movement of materials and energy. It does this by using the 3R (reduce-reuse-recycle) principles to establish a plan of action for businesses. The circular economy promises a brighter future for businesses, industries, and society by implementing it first at the corporate level and then at the industrial park and regional levels.
The circular economy has emerged in recent years as a framework for industrial and environmental policies in China (Winans et al., 2017; Zhu et al., 2019), Africa (World Economic Forum, 2020), the European Union (Völker et al., 2020), and the United States (ReMade Institute, 2021). According to proponents, the circular economy is a regenerative strategy that extends product life cycles via design, maintenance, repair, reuse, remanufacturing, refurbishing, and recycling to reduce resource input, waste, emissions, and energy loss (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017).
Innovation creates the groundwork for a company to achieve an economic-social-environmentally harmonious growth model, which has been widely supported by scholars and practitioners, while also striking a balance between environmental responsibility and profitability. For businesses looking to boost competitiveness and advance sustainable development, process innovation is essential (Terjesen & Patel, 2017; Von Krogh et al., 2018). Businesses may lessen the adverse effects of their operations on the environment by using process innovation. The industry’s transition to sustainable production and the development of sustainable manufacturing initiatives are greatly aided by process innovation.
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