Data Modeling
Mathematical and Computational Data Modeling
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Volume 4 Number 1 2023
RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)
Automating Affordable Safety: A Tech-Driven Sachet Water Business Model for Reducing Waterborne Disease in Bangladesh
Zannatul Ferdows, 1 Prof. Dr. KM Khondaker Abdullah-AL-Mamun 1
Data Modeling 4 (1) 1-8 https://doi.org/10.25163/data.4110813
Submitted: 24 January 2023 Revised: 18 March 2023 Accepted: 26 March 2023 Published: 28 March 2023
Abstract
Bangladesh still loses tens of thousands of people every year to waterborne disease, and the usual fallback for households that can afford it — bottled water — turns out to carry its own quiet risks, from microplastic contamination to chemical drift caused by long-term plastic storage. Sachet water, by contrast, has already proven itself cheap, portable, and reasonably safe in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, and the Philippines, yet it remains almost entirely absent from the Bangladeshi market, despite a public-health need that is arguably more urgent here than almost anywhere else. This paper sets out to do two related things. First, it lays out just how large that need is: diarrheal illness alone accounts for an estimated 4.2 million cases annually, dwarfing cholera, typhoid, and dysentery combined, and existing water options leave a persistent gap between what is affordable and what is actually safe. Second, and more substantively, it specifies — in operational rather than aspirational detail — a four-layer automated business model covering production and quality control, digital order management, and traceable distribution, designed specifically to remove the points where human inconsistency has historically let water quality slip in other sachet-water markets. The model was built through a structured synthesis of prior evidence rather than new field data, so what is offered here is a reasoned, evidence-grounded specification rather than a tested intervention. Even so, read against the cost and disease-burden data presented alongside it, the model offers a plausible, reproducible blueprint for narrowing Bangladesh's safe-water gap, and a concrete starting point for the empirical validation that would need to follow. Keywords: sachet water; waterborne disease; automation; water access; Bangladesh
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