Solar Water Pasteuriser 3: BENEFITS. Making safe potable water saves lives & time.
Channel: solaryes
Date: 2013-03-27

Clean water is vital.  This concept video proposes a low cost, locally made and installed, and crucially, virally deployed solar thermal water pasteuriser. It delivers clean water. Around 1.1 billion people lack access to clean drinking. One of the main problems of dirty water is diarrhoea: a symptom of infection caused by a host of pathogens, most of which spread via contaminated water. World-wide, diarrhoea causes 4% of all global deaths, and is responsible for around 8% of all deaths in Southeast Asia and Africa. It kills 2.2 million people per year. Children in developing tropical countries are the most badly affected.

This project sets a high benchmark for innovation. While a low cost water pasteuriser is, in itself an innovation, because those few that exist are high cost and imported, the key innovation is in its very local nature of copying and installation: its essential viral deployment. If this succeeds, then replicability will be substantial and many lives will be saved. A number of replication factors are to be used including: besides participatory design and manufacture, marketing approaches will include instructional youtube videos, web pages and paper instructions, in both local languages and internationalized-language free formats. 

This proposed new solar water pasteurization technology will be substantially improved, compared to existing high tech versions, because it will be appropriate, and not imported high tech. It will retain full safety performance & reliability of the few existing imported, products currently being successfully deployed as one-off donations, such as by SwissSolarKiosk. Instead of being expensive and imported, our technology will cost little to make, use local labour and, crucially, be easily copied, reducing dependency on external input. Thanks to its simplicity, cheapness, success and popularity, the technology should self-replicate locally and appropriately.

This practical project addresses a clearly identified, life-saving need for clean water. While we have several candidate sites at present, more are being sought. Next, they will be reduced in number to three prioritized sites in three continents. To do this, essential selection criteria will include: being in the tropics, so sunlight levels do not vary too greatly, sickness in communities due to drinking bio-contaminated surface water from waterways, ponds or shallow wells for at least 3 month per year, this water being generally not too turbid, chemically soft water which contains no toxic chemicals such as arsenic, communities having the potential of closing the wider sanitation loop, where there are cultural opportunities to deliver viralisation, such as a local health education programme support, also where a spoken language  is shared with the individual who visits them to deploy & viralise the technology. 

Will mothers become some of the project's leading advocates? This project will deliver several linked health-related benefits by creating a self-supporting momentum from a range of stakeholders having different, but positive interests. While it will particularly empower women, many others will also benefit. Here is a brief discussion of who and why...

Everyone benefits from good quality drinking water, in particular, vulnerable children, older or immunosuppressed (eg HIV-infected) people. Women and carers (of fewer sick people), will gain more time for other productive activities, which may be social, educational or economic.

Where water was boiled to kill pathogens, the incidence of scalding, particularly, of women who boil it, and of children nearby, will decline, because boiling will happen less. Where bought-in fossil fuels such as kerosene were used to boil water,  the whole community will gain economically because less wealth will leave it to buy fuel. Where firewood is used to boil water, its collectors, typically women and children, will have more free time for more productive activities. And less smoke benefits those with respiratory conditions, such as asthmatics.

Local community-level engagement will be vital to the project's success. In terms of health, to deliver the project's full potential, the pasteuriser must be deployed in the context of closing the sanitation loop, requiring coverage of germ theory and practical hygiene including in contexts such as latrines and food preparation.  Open access teaching and consultations on the design, construction, use and maintenance (which is low) of the pasteuriser will take place.

The fact that some project members have teaching experience will facilitate delivery. The processes of consultation, and of local people actually making the pasteurizers will deliver community benefits including autonomy. The viral process of showing neighbours and others how to manufacture will deliver local empowerment, valuable reciprocal bonds of obligation, plus stimulation of the informal economy.

Of course, saving lives is the top goal.