Continuous quality improvement of safe water storage containers: a cluster randomized trial in rural Burkina Faso

Safe storage protects household drinking water from contamination, maintaining water quality and preventing diarrheal and other water-borne diseases. However, achieving high adoption and sustained used of safe storage is challenging. We developed a safe water storage container (SWSC) intervention using the Lean Six Sigma continuous quality improvement framework in rural Ghana to optimize adoption and water quality, and subsequently adapted the SWSC for implementation in Burkina Faso. This study reports the impacts of the adapted Burkinabe SWSC on Escherichia coli contamination in household stored water in a cluster randomized trial with 49 intervention villages (274 households) and 50 no-intervention control (290 households). Metadata is included as the first sheet of the Excel file. This trial was funded by WaterAid and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.