Learning together helps families sustain safer water treatment practices
Giving families information about the health benefits of cleaner water may not be enough to change behavior for good. A field experiment in Karachi, Pakistan, finds that families were much more likely to keep chlorinating their water when both they and their neighbors had learned from their own experience.
Chlorine tablets offer a simple and effective way to make drinking water safer. The challenge is getting households to continue using them over time. New research co-authored by Akib Khan, Postdoc Fellow at the House of Sustainable Society, suggests that the social environment in which people learn can make a substantial difference.
The study covers a population of caregivers of children living in slums in Karachi, Pakistan. Among 900 households included in the experiment, some received free chlorine tablets for 15 months. Others received the tablets plus a visual tool for the first six months that helped caregivers track diarrhea among their children before and after chlorine became available.
The idea was to let families see the health effects in their own household rather than simply telling them that chlorination works.
“People may understand information very differently when they can connect it to something they have experienced themselves,” says Khan. “Our results suggest that this personal learning experience also influences what they learn from the experiences of people around them. Learning through shared experience is common, whether socialized through exploring new activities together or institutionalized through education in the classroom.”
Experience and social learning rely on each other
The researchers compared households depending on both the learning support they received and whether their neighbors randomly received the same support.
Neither learning from personal experience alone nor having a neighbor who had used the learning tool produced lasting changes in chlorination. The striking difference appeared when households had both: their own experience with the learning tool and neighbors who had gone through the same experiential learning.
These households chlorinated their water at significantly higher rates over the study, with chlorine use 41 percent higher than among other chlorine recipients. The researchers call this mechanism “joint experiential learning”: people appear better able to learn from others when they first gain relevant experience themselves.
“It’s not simply about giving people more information or encouraging neighbors to talk to each other,” says Khan. “The shared learning experience seems to give that information meaning. When your neighbor has gone through the same learning process, their experience becomes more useful to you as you better understand the context of that experience.”
Lasting effects on children's health
One year after the researchers withdrew the learning intervention, children in households that had used the learning tool and had neighbors who had also used it showed the largest health improvements.
In this group, the estimated improvement in child health was nearly twice the effect of providing free chlorine alone. The findings suggest that how health interventions are distributed across communities may therefore matter as much as what individual households receive.
For policymakers and organizations working to improve public health, the findings point to a practical implication. Programs designed to encourage lasting behavior change may benefit from giving groups of neighboring households the opportunity to learn through the same experience, rather than targeting households in isolation.
In settings such as flood-prone Karachi, where unsafe water can have serious consequences, designing interventions around communities could help relatively simple health technologies deliver benefits long after temporary incentives and learning tools disappear.
Research details
“Experiential and Social Learning”
Authors:
- Agha Ali Akram, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
- Gabriella Fleischman, University of Pittsburgh
- Reshmaan Hussam, Harvard Business School
- Akib Khan, House of Sustainable Society, Stockholm School of Economics
