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