The search for pure water in Ghana precedes its independence from the British by many decades. In 1888, against the wishes of the local population, the colonial government closed two “grossly polluted” ponds and opened two new reservoirs in Accra to ease the city’s already “perennial water supply problem”, wrote historian K David Patterson in an article for Social Science & Medicine. Only three years later, an analyst declared one of the reservoirs unusable for humans. Twenty years after that, the Akimbo Reservoir was a muddy pit less than a foot deep, where pigs and guinea-worm-laden women waded.

An ‘Annual Report for 1898’ on the Gold Coast, prepared by the Acting Colonial Secretary of the region for British Parliament, said: “There are two great difficulties to contend with in carrying out any efficient system of sanitation… (a) the inadequate water supply, (b) the filthy and lazy habits of the very large majority of the native population.” It noted that the locals were “naturally dirty” and that they made “every yard and street in the native quarter of the town into a virtual cesspool”. Rather than take responsibility for its failure to provide clean water or decent sanitation, the colonial government blamed the locals for refusing to use public latrines or see the “necessity of cleanly habits as a safeguard to health”.

In 1942, the Accra town council carried out a campaign “to inform and teach people on how pure drinking water is produced, why the process has a related cost and how to save and use water wisely to prevent waste”, wrote historian Anna Bohman in her doctoral dissertation at Umeå University, ‘Framing the Water and Sanitation Challenge: A history of urban water supply and sanitation in Ghana 1909-2005’. That year, in a broadcast from Accra by the Director of Public Works, citizens were told that water “is as precious as gold” and that “if you waste water you are guilty of a serious crime”.

Freed from their colonisers in 1957, the administration of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, took control and water turned from a problem of quenching the natives to an issue of national pride. “Giving every Ghanaian access to water,” Bohman wrote, “symbolized a step away from colonial rule as it would provide infrastructure for the social development of the country and its people.” A few years after independence, only a sixth of Ghanaians had some sort of access to good drinking water. Today, that number has risen to more than 80 per cent – a great improvement, but one that masks the complex and multi-layered search for pure water that dominates Ghanaians’ lives, particularly in Accra.

The population of Accra, the commercial hub of West Africa, has continued to outpace the city’s water supply ever since the aforementioned muddy reservoirs were its drinking water sources. In 1911, there were fewer than 20,000 residents of Accra; by 1948, there were nearly 136,000, and six years later nearly 200,000. With every new inhabitant came a greater need for water. Now, there are about two million people in the city and more than four million in the metropolitan area, and there is a 60-million-gallon daily water supply deficit generally attributed to amateurish water resource management.

As recently as the late 1990s, drinking water was sold on the streets of Accra in shared cups scooped out of big aluminium vats. Later, this unhygienic process was displaced by water in disposable plastic bags, tied at the top and cooled by ice blocks. Around the time the scooped water was going out of style, the sachet-packing machines became available, and now sachets are the primary unit of water in Ghana and the dominant medium of drinking water in the capital. They are more popular than bottled water and water coolers, which are products for the rich, and more popular than tap water, which people don’t believe to be safe to drink.

The idea of putting water in sachets seems to have come from Nigeria, but it has found a comfortable home in Ghana, where the urban population passed 50 per cent in 2010 – from only 23 per cent in 1960. Although I wasn’t able to find any verified records for sachet water in Ghana, Raymond Mensah Gbetivi, a commercial manager at Voltic (one of the largest sachet producers in Ghana), told me that his very rough estimates put the size of the sachet market at around 4.5 billion sold per year nationwide. Voltic alone sold about 450 million sachets last year, though Gbetivi insisted that the big players are still catching up to the family-owned sachet makers.

“About 70 per cent of the market is controlled by the small-small guys,” he told me (again, his rough estimate). Voltic, which is owned by the multinational company SABMiller, competes with a few other big Ghanaian brands such as Everpure and Special Ice, but also with hundreds – if not thousands – of mom-and-pop brands like Johnnie Water. Starting a sachet business is only a matter of having access to running water and buying a packing machine for a few thousand dollars. Once you have those, you can immediately start producing and selling.

“We’re making the water available to a certain class of people,” Gbetivi told me. Though sachets are Voltic’s biggest business by volume, they make less profit in total than their bottles and dispensers. But the demand for sachets is so high that even producers that usually target the wealthy can’t ignore it: the market is approaching the size of the population of the country, 25 million people.

“People don’t trust municipal supply and availability,” said Gbetivi. “That’s the reason sachets came about.” That lack of trust crosses borders; sachet water use has spread to all the West African countries bordering Ghana and Nigeria, to India, and possibly to Central America.