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Public Health Classics
This section looks back to some ground-breaking contributions to public health, reproducing them in their original form and adding a commentary on their significance from a modern-day perspective. John Thompson & Sandy Cairncross review the 1972 book Drawers of water: domestic water use in East Africa by Gilbert White, David Bradley, & Anne White, an extract of which is reproduced by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
The public health classic reproduced on the following pages is an extract from the first thorough study of water use in a developing country from the consumer's point of view. It was a seminal starting point for many of those professionals, gradually increasing in number during the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981-90) and beyond, who devoted their careers to extending water supply and sanitation services to the unserved millions in the developing world. In awakening the appetite of many of its readers to the excitement of interdisciplinary research in this field, Drawers of water (1) has done more to improve water supplies for the poor than any standard engineering or social science textbook.
Although more than thirty years have passed since the fieldwork was conducted, Drawers of water is still relevant and informative. Numerous studies have deliberately imitated its approach (2-4). According to Sydney Rosen &Jeffrey Vincent of Harvard University (5): "Knowledge of household water supply and productivity ... is limited to a handful of original studies, which continue to be cited and recycled in the literature. Foremost among them is Drawers ofwater... Drawers of water remains the most comprehensive and compelling account available [of] ... water use in ... Africa."
East Africa was chosen as the study location because the diversity of landscape, climate, hydrology and geology allowed for analysis of domestic water use under different environmental conditions. The region also possessed dispersed settlements in which many people lived in scattered compounds or households. This allowed for analysis of individual decision-making in domestic water use. Finally, it was home to a wide assortment of ethnic groups, which provided an opportunity to analyse the different cultural dimensions.
The data reported in Drawers of water were acquired between 1966 and 1968 by interviews and observations at 34 study sites in...