INTRODUCTION
Water is an invaluable requirement for man and microbes alike. Water is essential to aid digestion, give shape and form to cells and encourage the movement and transportation of nutrients round the body. Water is also essential for transportation from outside the cells to the inside and vice versa. It is near impossible for living things to carry on for long without water. This may explain why water is in abundance around us even in inland regions where water bodies are seemingly scarce, water is found in rocks, beneath the soils and other natural sources. But water may be free of pathogenic microorganisms (Bhumbla et al., 2020).
Earlier, it was stated that microorganisms also require water for transport of nutrients between the exterior and interior of cell similar to human cells and water may be required to give shape to microbial cells. Common species found in water are; Salmonella sp., Shigella sp., Escherichia coli, Bacillus sp. and others. These microbial species are responsible for causing different kinds of diseases upon consumption of the water (Unsafe drinking water along with poor sanitation and hygiene, accounts for nearly 10% of the total burden of diseases worldwide, the World Health Organisation shows that nearly 663 million people in the world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, still lack access to safe and clean drinking water) (Pradhan et al., 2018; Masanyiwa et al., 2019). According to the Joint Monitoring Programme report, more than 700 million people do not have access to improved drinking water sources and hundreds of millions with “improved” drinking water do not have access to a source that is microbiologically safe to drink (Ojomo et al., 2015; Ghislaine et al., 2016). Hence, the need for household water treatment and storage methods, although, the practice of HWTS is not new and the methods have continued to improve over time, several barriers exist for non-compliance and non-practice. Even though efficacy of treatment and storage methods have been confirmed, several studies have revealed that in rural communities of developing nations where access to safe water is absent or non-existent, records have shown non-adherence to the use of HWTS (Ojomo et al., 2015; Ghislaine et al., 2016; Pradhan et al., 2018; Masanyiwa et al., 2019).