A field experiment in Tangier, Morocco, by Massuchusetts Institute of Technology economist Esther Duflo revealed, "...people in households that gain running water report significant improvements in well-being and happiness."Details about the experiment, done in 2008, were contained in a recent R&D Magazine article by Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office. The experiment comprised 845 households in Tangier. Of these, 434 were selected randomly as the treatment group and given the opportunity to connect to the municipal water supply on credit terms. The balance of the households were the control group.

Baseline information included these observations:

• Households without running water spend seven hours per week fetching water from public taps

• In households without running water, two-thirds of the people cite water access as a major concern

• Water-related conflicts in families or between neighbours have been experienced by 28% of the people

During the course of the experiment:

• 69% of the treatment group households paid for a municipal water connection within six months

• 10% of the control group obtained connections during the same period

• 44% of the treatment group households said, "...overall quality of life improved in the last year,..."; Only 23% in the control group made this claim

• Water expenditures in the treatment group doubled from $11/month to $21/month

• By mid-2010 over 40% of the loans were repaid

• New spare time resulting from household water connections was most often used for community and social activities rather than additional employment to pay for the connection

My interpretations of the relevance of this Moroccan experiment to water-from-air (WFA) technologies are these:

• WFA equipment in individual homes is a rapid means of improving quality of life (if electricity is available in the homes)

• Neighbourhood-scale piped networks from larger, locally central WFA equipment installations are an equally good idea for quality of life improvements
• People appear to be willing to buy access to water with reasonable credit terms; This can help deal with the relatively high capital cost of WFA equipment
  
• People appear to place a relatively high value on the convenience of having a water faucet right in their home; The relatively high capital cost of WFA equipment is not necessarily an insurmountable barrier
  

• Least preferred is WFA equipment delivering water to a public tap although this may be a useful interim solution for improving water availability in a neighbourhood

Note that the relatively high capital cost of WFA equipment has to be seen in context. It may be much cheaper to drill wells for groundwater but the source may be overdrawn and soon depleted. Also, there may be contaminants such as arsenic in the groundwater. Reverse osmosis desalination may be another alternative but drinking water having relatively high residual salt content has been implicated in health problems for some individuals. Generally, WFA should only be considered as a viable water supply solution in humid subtropical or tropical climates when there is water scarcity that cannot be resolved by treatment of existing supplies of surface water or groundwater.