The science behind Udara
The problems are measured. The fixes are tested.
Udara joins two problems researchers have already sized up, plastic waste and unsafe drinking water, and answers them with approaches that field studies show work: make the good thing free, and catch the bottle where it is used.
Nigeria has one of the world’s biggest plastic problems
The first global inventory of plastic pollution, published in Nature by researchers at the University of Leeds, puts Nigeria second in the world at about 3.5 million tonnes a year, behind only India, and names Lagos as a hotspot. The World Bank expects waste in Sub-Saharan Africa to nearly triple by 2050, in a region that collects less than half of it today.
Udara recovers the bottles it hands out, so they go back into the recycling chain instead of the gutter.
Most Nigerians still lack safe drinking water
The WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, the official tracker for clean water worldwide, finds that only about 30% of people in Nigeria used a safely managed drinking water service in 2024.
Every Udara bottle holds licensed, NAFDAC-approved drinking water.
Free gets used. Cheap gets skipped.
J-PAL’s review of randomized trials found that even tiny fees collapse uptake: when a Kenyan deworming program started charging about 30 cents, take-up fell from 75% to 19%. In a separate set of trials, free chlorine at village water points got more than half of households treating their water, and they were still doing it 30 months later.
Sponsors pay for the batch, so drinkers pay nothing. No small fee stands between people and clean water.
Bottles come back when there is a system to catch them
The OECD reports that when Ecuador put a 2-cent deposit on PET bottles, recycling jumped from 30% to 80% within a year. UNEP notes that countries with bottle-return systems, like Germany and Sweden, collect 80 to 90% of bottles.
Udara collects empties where the water is handed out, so the bottle has somewhere to go the moment it is finished.
Plastic waste is value thrown away
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that only 14% of plastic packaging is collected for recycling worldwide, and 95% of its material value, worth $80 to 120 billion a year, is lost after a single use.
Udara treats every bottle as a resource, and puts 10% of profits back into water and wifi hubs in communities.
These organisations have not endorsed or partnered with Udara. Their published research informs how the Udara model is designed.
Learn more about the product on About Udara or go back to the home page.