Willingness to pay for fluoride-free water in Tanzania: disentangling the importance of behavioural factors

ABSTRACT

Approximately 200 million people, mainly concentrated in rural areas of the Great East African Rift Valley, suffer from fluorosis caused by excess of fluoride naturally contained in water. This study employs the RANAS (Risk, Attitude, Norm, Ability, Self-regulation) model to understand how behavioural factors influence Tanzanian rural communities’ willingness to pay for fluoride-free water obtained from a new defluoridator device. Results show that perceived risk, knowledge, attitudes and descriptive norms significantly influence the adoption of the proposed healthy behaviour. Policy implications are discussed taking into account how rural communities could achieve equitable and affordable access to safe water.

KEYWORDS:

• Rift Valley
• fluorosis
• water
• behavioural changes
• contingent valuation
• policies

Acknowledgements

The authors thank an anonymous referee and the editor for their insightful comments while the manuscript was under review. The manuscript also benefitted from the excellent comments by Delia Chiaro and Maria Sabbagh. The authors also thank OIKOS East Africa for logistical help during the survey. Needless to say, any shortcoming are the authors’ alone. The paper is dedicated to the memory of our friend and co-author, Professor Giorgio Ghiglieri, who sadly passed away during the journal review process. Without his work and brilliant coordination of the FLOWERED project, this paper would have never been published.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2021.1996341

Additional information

Funding

The research was financially supported by the FLOWERED project, a European Commission Horizon 2020‐funded project [grant agreement number 690378].