Household adoption of domestic water filtration for combating waterborne diseases in developing countries

Drinking contaminated water is a leading cause of several waterborne diseases. Domestic water filtration plants are treated as one of the possible alternative tools to combat the disease caused by contaminated drinking water. Little is known about the usage behaviour of households to use water filtration plants at the domestic level in combating waterborne disease. Unveiling how different social, economic, and technological factors can mold household usage behavior to use domestic water filtration plants can be helpful in combating the spread of diseases caused by contaminated water. We have collected a cross-sectional dataset from one of the developing countries and applied the SEM-ANN dual-stage hybrid model to test the proposed hypotheses and rank the social, economic, and technological factors according to their normalised importance. Results revealed that awareness of risks associated with contaminated water, social influence, and water pollution knowledge are the most significant predictors behind the use of domestic water filtration plants, whereas cost is a potential barrier. Gender was found to be a significant moderator and caused a small moderation in our study. Our study results have important policy suggestions for governments and other stakeholders to combat waterborne disease and achieve the WHO's clean water goal 2030.