Improving Drinking Water Access: Insights from Chengcheng Zhai’s Dissertation

Chengcheng Zhai, a Kelley School PhD student with a deep personal connection to rural life, has spent her academic career focused on addressing inequities in resource allocation, particularly in rural areas of developing countries. Growing up in a remote village called GanQiKa in Inner Mongolia, China, Zhai experienced firsthand the stark contrasts between rural and urban living conditions. “My first elementary school had latrines, no running water, and families took turns donating coal to heat the classrooms,” she recalled. These experiences, contrasted with later years spent in Beijing where her school had bathrooms, running water, and central heating, ignited her interest in addressing disparities in resource access.

Zhai successfully defended her dissertation in May 2024, a culmination of years of research into drinking water access issues in Africa. She is joining the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame as an Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations. Her dissertation committee members include Kurt Bretthauer and Jorge Mejia, Faculty Fellows at the Institute for Environmental and Social Sustainability.

Her dissertation is a comprehensive investigation into how NGOs operating in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) can improve their operational decisions regarding the location of new water points, the maintenance of existing water points, and the fundraising strategies to boost donations. As Zhai emphasizes, “Worldwide, over 700 million people still lack access to clean drinking water, with more than half living in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa.” This global challenge is a focus of one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are working tirelessly to improve water access.

Ethiopia, January 2020. A public stand-tap in Tigray, Ethiopia. Typically, a community member, usually a woman, manages the opening and closing of the water site and collects fees from those who come to fetch water.	Ethiopia, January 2020. People use jerrycans to store water. Each jerrycan holds 20 liters and weighs about 45 pounds. People carry jerrycans on their shoulders or heads, while wealthier families may use donkeys to transport water.

To deepen her understanding of the challenges and strategies employed by these NGOs, Zhai conducted two field research trips: one in Ethiopia in January 2020 and another in Malawi in June 2022. Additionally, she interned at charity: water, a leading fundraising charity in the water sector, from June 2020 to June 2023. Throughout her Ph.D. studies, she closely collaborated with several Africa-based NGOs in countries including Ethiopia, Malawi, and the Central African Republic.

Her dissertation is organized into three interconnected studies, each addressing the drinking water access problems through operations management (OM) concepts.

The first study focuses on optimizing the location of new water points to improve drinking water access and equity. Zhai developed a water point location optimization model that reflects current practices of decentralized decision-making and water point management, with an equal $50-per-beneficiary budget. To address water access equity, she proposes three alternative models: a minimax model, an equitable budget model, and a centralized model. These models provide recommendations for NGOs based on three critical dimensions: the feasibility of community collaboration, groundwater distribution characteristics, and the NGO’s specific objectives.

In her second study, Zhai examines the design of an effective water point maintenance program to minimize water point downtime and associated logistics costs. She developed an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process from an NGO’s perspective and applied the optimization model to data from NGOs in the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, and Malawi. Through extensive numerical experiments, she found that, contrary to the belief of many NGOs, preventive maintenance can significantly reduce water point downtime with minimal increases in logistics costs, if any. Based on her findings, she further recommends that resource-constrained NGOs invest in capacity to visit more water points, reduce water point repair demand (such as by using higher-quality spare parts), and reduce major repair costs (such as by efficiently sourcing spare parts) before investing in collecting more functionality information.

The third study investigates the role of operational transparency in increasing donations. Zhai conducted a controlled laboratory experiment to study how different types of operational transparency could impact donation outcomes. In addition to a baseline of no transparency, she considered four types of transparency: transparency of operational success, transparency of community needs, transparency of detection of failures, and transparency of service recovery. Specifically, she utilized information on water point functionality to demonstrate the operational performance of NGO-sponsored water points. Her findings revealed that participants in the transparency of operational success and service recovery treatments rated their perceptions of NGO effort as significantly higher than those in the baseline of no transparency. However, the experiment did not yield statistically significant results in terms of likelihood to donate and donation amount across the five treatments. Drawing on the insights gained from the experiment, Zhai proposes several changes to the experimental design that could enhance the effectiveness of future studies.

In summary, the three studies in Zhai’s dissertation provide insights into strategic decision-making for NGO-driven rural water supply programs, ranging from project location optimization to maintenance strategies and donation enhancement through operational transparency. Her work stands as a significant contribution to improving drinking water access in rural areas of developing countries. “I hope that this dissertation will inspire more impactful and relevant research in the field of humanitarian operations management,” Zhai reflects. “Together, we can solve the drinking water crisis.”

Malawi, June 2022. Chengcheng assisted mechanics with maintenance and repair services. Community members often gather to help when NGO mechanics work on a well, sometimes bringing sugar cane as a token of appreciation.	Malawi, June 2022. Chengcheng pumping water after a repair. Filling a 20-liter jerrycan with fewer than 40 pumps indicates a well in good condition, but continuous pumping was quite challenging.