‘You can’t blame people for risky choices if there are no better options’: Household water safety in the Dominican Republic

Household water insecurity, fractured systems of water delivery, and intermittent water supply hamper efforts to ensure that the water households consume is safe. Household water treatment and safe storage are often advocated as effective, rapidly deployed, and cost-effective solutions to these problems. However, the effectiveness of these measures and household compliance with them often degrade over time. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of household strategies for ensuring water safety, and investigates the perceptions that influence these practices in the Dominican Republic. A mixed methods approach was adopted, which combines a household survey, interviews, immersive research, and water sample testing for E. coli using AguaGenX’s compartment bag test. The findings show that no water sources in the study communities were reliably free of E. coli contamination, and households’ efforts to ensure water safety exacerbate the problems they are employed to resolve. We discuss the JMP drinking water services ladder and demonstrate how these indicators lead to overestimates of water service provision. We argue that household water treatment and safe storage strategies cannot be relied on to resolve chronic failures in the delivery of water services. Rather, devolving the responsibility for water safety to households increases their user burden and the risk of contracting waterborne diseases.