Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont Pitzer Senior Theses Pitzer Student Scholarship 2015 The tS ate of Sachets: Ghana’s Private Sector Solution to a Public Infrastructure Problem Robert J. Little Pitzer College Recommended Citation Little, Robert J., "The tS ate of Sachets: Ghana’s Private Sector Solution to a Public Infrastructure Problem" (2015). Pitzer Senior Theses. Paper 62. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/62 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Pitzer Student Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pitzer Senior Theses by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The State of Sachets: Ghana’s Private Sector Solution to a Public Infrastructure Problem Robert James Little In partial fulfillment of a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Environmental Analysis at Pitzer College, Claremont, California. Spring 2015 Readers: Professor Melinda Herrold-Menzies and Professor Paul Faulstich Abstract Known colloquially as “purewater”, sachet water has outcompeted all alternatives to Ghana’s unreliable government water infrastructure and serves as the cheap, portable, omnipresent solution for narrowing the safe water access gap. Each single-use sachet holds 500 ml of filtered potable water and is heat-sealed in a high- density polyethylene bag. Insufficient and often skeptical scholarship exists surrounding the state of sachet water in Ghana, and almost no research incorporates qualitative data into analysis and future recommendations. In the face of incomplete and decontextualized research on sachet water, this study aims to use qualitative data concerning Ghanaian viewpoints to showcase the recent positive developments in the lifecycle of sachet water.