Example: Color and meaning in Bangladesh

When some organizations identified wells in Bangladesh as contaminated with arsenic, they were marked - red dots for bad wells and green dots for good wells. However there are behavioral barriers: people don't like unfamiliar wells; they can't see the effects of arsenic immediately; and people without experience of traffic lights may not know that red is bad and green is good.[1] In fact, Bangladeshis like the color red more than green.[2]

Blogger (and law professor) Eugene Volokh writes:

Not that this means you shouldn't do anything -- on the facts reported in this article, it seems pretty clear that it's better to have today's arsenic problem than yesterday's cholera problem (but then again, the article doesn't give enough information to say that for sure). All I draw from the article is that public health and development planners -- and any policymaker -- should have a sense of humility about the solutions they propose.[1]

Another issue is red-green color blindness, though this mainly affects men, whereas women are the ones who most often collect water.

Footnotes and references

  1. 1.0 1.1 The Volokh Conspiracy (archive) by Eugene Volokh (Law Professor at UCLA). The comments are based on an article written in German, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
  2. Statement made in talk by Peter Kelly of AusAID to an Engineers Without Borders (NSW) meeting, October 11 2006

External links

Blogs

  • No Average Days - Teaching reproductive health and gender in rural Bangladesh.
  • Pyjama Samsara - Relief/development/latrines in post-tsunami Nias, Indonesia.
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