Social Environment

The social forces of the environment include the demographic characteristics of the population and its values. Especially for business in water management and sanitation, culture plays an important role when assigning the value and the potential demand to products and services (read about water sanitation and culture). Culture is considered as a system of shared values, beliefs, behaviour and symbols that the members of society groups use to interact with their social surrounding. Therefore, it is of great importance to understand the way your market will perceive your product, and whether it will fulfil their needs, according to their own set of values. This might be a critical factor affecting the profitability of your business.

Furthermore, you should also be aware of the way business is carried out in a particular place, particularly because the understanding of ethics in business varies from country to country, and what might be bribery for you could be a normal practice for others (read about water corruption). The level of education is also a key factor that you should take into account when starting up a service delivery business in water and sanitation. As a SSWM entrepreneur, probably working at the international level, you might need to have various teams working in different countries at project sites. When local personnel and labour costs are low, you might need to monitor closely the development of the projects, as the understanding of quality, accuracy, safety at the workplace, monitoring and maintenance, customer satisfaction, among many others, might be different to yours. And this can cost you money, which you need to budget when making the offer for your services.

Even more interesting than ancestral differences among cultures and societies is the way societies are changing nowadays. The changing demographic factors that you should keep an eye on are: population growth rates, graying of the population, changing of the population distribution, and the size of households. For instance, there is a growing trend of high-middle class population shifting to remote suburbs and small towns. Also, many families have a second “weekend” home in remote areas such as beaches, mountains and valleys. Normally, these areas do not have yet a water and sanitation system in place, which gives SSWM entrepreneurs multiple business opportunities. Moreover, we are witnessing a worldwide “eco”-movement toward healthful products and lifestyles. The world is becoming more aware of the impact of our actions on our natural environment, and humanity now feels the need to doing something about it (read more about awareness raising tools). This offers a great opportunity to SSWM entrepreneurs for marketing strategies, especially when creating their unique selling proposition, as offering products and services which give the opportunity to their customers to be environmental conscious and social responsible.

Browse through the readings below to give yourself an introduction to the topic water-sanitation-society. To get more information regarding basics on population trends and characteristics you should review data from periodic publications or statistics from the Census Bureau and other federal, state, and local governmental agencies. The United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development publish periodic reports detailing international developments in this area.