Community based clean water system that can serve 5000 people

The lack of clean drinking water for one billion people around the world, from an engineering perspective, is one of the most baffling problems on the planet.  Consider the vast number of water sanitation organizations and the fact that we’ve known how to effectively sanitize our drinking water for centuries.  Yet somehow diarrheal disease (caused from drinking unsafe water) remains a top killer of children around the world.  In some cases, a simple low-cost filter is all that is necessary to save a life.

Of course, the problem of clean water is not that cut and dry.  Most organizations that ask us about water technologies are not sure what they are looking for, they just know that it’s a problem they should be addressing.  If this is you, we’ve put together a Water Assessment workshop with overall guidelines on the steps you would take to gather the information you need to select a sanitation technology.  In addition to that, here’s the top five things to consider if you’re contemplating a clean water program:

1.  Know what you’re fighting.

There are three main types of water contaminants and no single technology is effective against all of them.  Start by figuring out what is contaminating the water.  To do this, you may need a local university lab on your side to help with the analysis.  Or, you might check to see if a local organization has already conducted water tests in your region.

2.  One more time:  no single technology is effective against all water contaminants.

Checking Manna's gravel-sand water filtration system.

The danger happens when you assume an expensive carbon filter will solve all of your problems in every community you enter.  You may need to combine a natural, low-tech filter (sand) with a higher-tech ultraviolet radiation.  (Check out Manna Energy’s system in Kigali, Rwanda).

3.  Understand how water is used.

And understand that simply surveying the community won’t get you the answer you need.  Spend time observing how people use water.  Observe if they treat drinking water differently than clothes-washing water.  Is water ever reused?  Are there differences in water collection points?  Understanding usage patterns and user values will help you understand where and how clean water needs to enter the picture.

4. Be conscientious about the choice between community-based water systems versus water systems for individual families.

Both have their positives and negatives.  The main drivers: cost, maintenance (who will fix a broken system if no one technically owns it?), and access.

5.  Clean water is pointless without sanitation.

If we pour clean water into a dirty cup, our efforts are for naught.  Clean water programs need to be coupled with sanitation training.  They both need the other to be truly effective.  This is oftentimes a point of failure for water programs – both sanitation and clean water treatment require some semblance of education and behavioral change.  Always a challenge.

It goes without saying that if there were to be a #6, it would be this:  do not reinvent the wheel!  As mentioned in the opening paragraph, countless water organizations and technologies exist.  Leverage and adapt them.

image from Global Envision

In most developing countries, almost half of all births take place in the home often with the assistance of a birth attendant.  According to a study by the International Center for Advancing Neonatal Health at Johns Hopkins, a major factor contributing to neonatal and maternal infections is delivery in the home under unhygienic conditions by untrained birth attendants.  The use of a clean delivery kit has a dramatic effect on maternal health, reducing infection and the incidence of sepsis. 

We’re excited to announce our latest project with AYZH, a social venture looking through the eyes of women to identify the tools they want and need to help improve their standard of living. Founded by Zubaida Bai, a recent graduate of the Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise Program who formerly worked for a Lemelson foundation initiative in India, AYZH serves the needs of impoverished women worldwide by bringing them affordable appropriate technologies that increase income and/or improve health.  One of AYZH’s first products on the market includes a clean delivery birth kit. Catapult joins this program to evaluate cost, branding, and a sustainability strategy for kit components, currently piloting in India.  More program info to come!

The outhouse, with our tents and hogan in the distance.

We pitched our tents outside our host family’s hogan outside Sawmill, AZ on day one of CataCAMP.  Our hosts, the Begay Family, had a generator to power a refrigerator, a kerosene lamp, and a small propane tank with a hose snaking through a kitchen window to a stove range.  We could see and hear the buzzing of a distant high-voltage power line from our tents, but the Begay’s home was just out of range for access to electricity or running water.

According to the the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA) – the entity responsible for providing the Navajo reservation with electricity, water and natural gas – 18,000 people on the reservation still do not have electricity in their homes.   On day four of CataCAMP, we drove an hour down a bumpy dirt road with the NTUA to reach a home just west of Monument Valley with a hybrid wind-solar energy system, one of the off-grid renewable systems the NTUA turns to for its most remote customers.  The distance alone makes servicing the system a large time-commitment, but it also requires a heavy-duty truck to take on the nearly impassable “roads.”   The system size (880W for a hybrid system) these families receive are standardized to reduce costs. However, this means that when a family plugs in their refrigerator the electricity “stops working.”

Solar system for a remote family.

It was interesting to listen to the NTUA’s reasoning behind the use of standardized systems when we have tried so hard with our clients to produce custom-sized systems that anticipate future energy needs.  The systems on the reservation were lacking, but they adequately performed the main job they were there to do: provide immediate power for moderate energy needs at a cost cheaper than running a electrical line to a house.

System sizing can be a tricky business.  Before visiting with the NTUA, our team went through a basic energy assessment workshop called “Present and Future Power Needs” (PDF, 225KB), based on our experience with our Rwanda Solar PV project.  The workshop outlines the process of cataloging appliances to understand how much power you need, and uses that number to derive how many solar panels and batteries you need in your energy system.  However, what we have witnessed (and what the Solar Electric Light Fund [SELF] has witnessed) is that once we have electricity we tend to over use it if a feedback loop is not in place.  Our sizing template accounts for that anticipated over use with a formula supplied to us by SELF.

While the second half of the workshop is specific to solar, the first half is relevant to any entity that wants to understand what size energy system they need.  Knowing that number will affect your cost and your choice in technology (wind, solar, biogas, etc).   Regardless of what technology you choose, it should be accompanied by training, maintenance and feedback loop that educates the user on consumption.

System sizing references:  Green Empowerment

Catapulters head to Boulder, CO this week to take part in the Unreasonable Institute‘s Summer Institute, a 10-week program uniting up to 25 young social entrepreneurs with bold ideas from around the world.  The Unreasonable Institute was founded by Daniel Epstein and Teju Ravilochan with this simple idea:  give high-impact social entrepreneurs wings.  To do that, “We attract experts, innovators, and specialists in the field of social entrepreneurship, investment, business, poverty eradication, engineering, health, and the civil sector to mentor them.”

Catapult is excited to join that line up, spending three days with the entrepreneurs and running a short workshop series on prototyping.  With the entrepreneurs we’ll walk through methods of rapidly testing out ideas both physically and experientially.

Follow the Unreasonable Institute’s progress through their recently launched “Unreasonable TV Episodes.”

Catapult’s work is as heavily rooted in cultural observation and research as it is design and technology.  From the moment Tyler and I started this organization, we knew we would have to build a team of “engineering anthropologists” – talented folks who can bridge the technology world with the needs of people in a culture completely outside their own. We focused this year’s training primarily on cultural research methods.  In order to practice these skills in real-time, we wanted to immerse the team in a foreign, unfamiliar culture.  Why the Navajo Reservation?  Catapult serves impoverished communities, and the Native American population is the most poverty-stricken community within the United States.  More than half of the Navajo Nation residents live below the poverty level. Yet they have culturally rich lives with many still practicing and preserving traditional ways.

CataCAMPers with Bessie from our host family.

Our Catapult team – comprised of backgrounds in product design, mechanical engineering, anthropology, international relations, user experience design, and marketing and advertising – spent eight days living on the reservation absorbing the culture, visiting tribal entities, engaging with a host family, and conducting a series of workshops.

The first few days were spent outside Sawmill, AZ at a summer sheep camp with the Begay family, our generous hosts.  We pitched our tents outside their hogan (the traditional, octagonal Navajo home) and spent three days observing their lives and hearing their stories.  We also spent time with the Indian Health Service in Chinle, AZ, interviewing doctors on the health and environmental challenges that the Navajo community faces.  We devoted an entire day to the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, the tribal entity responsible for electrification efforts on the reservation, visiting remote families with off-grid power solutions.  We finished our trip with a series of cultural events and attended the “Sheep is Life” festival in Tsaile, observed the beginning of an Enemy Way ceremony, visited the infamous flea market and local artisans in Gallup, NM, and hiked to Canyon de Chelly’s White House Ruins.

In the field with the NTUA.

Over the next few weeks, we will release our stories and publish our workshops in a blog series devoted to CataCAMP’s results.  Each attendee designed two workshops prior to CataCAMP and had 60 minutes to deliver it to the group and 30 minutes to collect feedback.  The revised workshops are being published as part of Catapult’s desire to contribute to the social impact design knowledge space.  Every day we receive emails from people interested in our work, and who want to know how to do what we do.  Without the ability to hire people, this is the next best thing we can offer – workshops for anyone and everyone to download, experiment with, and use to build their own internal research methods and understanding of the design process.

We welcome feedback and ideas from the public!  And finally, we want to thank our generous hosts for inviting our team into their homes and for leaving us with a memorable and enriching experience.

Investors and potential investors in Africa gathered in Dar es Salaam in early May for the World Economic Forum on Africa. Joining the forum were African government officials representing nearly every African nation, finance investors from China, India, the US and Europe, as well as non-profits, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs.  In the opening session, Tanzanian President Kikwete expressed his desire to propel agricultural growth, but the hot topics also included multinational investment in Africa, energy infrastructure, women entrepreneurship, and building social leaders.  The rallying cry: let’s stop talking about Africa’s “potential” and start building successful case studies.

The World Economic Forum tagline is “Committed to improving the state of the world.”  To me that requires tackling big issues like poverty and inequality through environmentally sustainable development. The driving factors to achieving environmental sustainability?  The use and design of technology. Empowering women. Supporting local innovation.

I was privileged to speak with a few individuals addressing these issues in Africa as policy makers, entrepreneurs, and non-profit organizations.  I asked each of them, “Tell me about innovation, design, women and/or technology in Africa.”  Here are some of their responses.

Nick Moon

Co-founder and Managing Director of Kickstart, a non-profit organization developing and marketing new technologies that are bought by local entrepreneurs and used to establish new small businesses.

“Very little work, in terms of design, innovation, technology in Africa, is being done for the people at the very bottom of the economic pyramid.  It’s generally assumed that somehow or another miniaturized or minimalized version of high-tech developed for wealthy economies will somehow trickle down to bottom the pyramid.  I think that’s totally the wrong approach.  Because these consumers are in such a different set of social, economic and emotional circumstances that they require technology solutions to be developed specifically to meet those circumstances.  And so it’s a completely different field.  Going further, it’s probably more true that we can upscale small or low-tech solutions we develop for the BOP so that they have the potential for trickling down into wealthy economies.”

Bruce McNamer

CEO of Technoserve, a non-profit providing business advice and access to both markets and capital to businesspeople in developing countries.

“I think increasing opportunity for women in business, intersecting that with technology, as well as increasing possibilities in distribution, and diffusion of innovation, not just for women, but all entrepreneurs, is necessary.  To attempt this years ago – to have the design tools and finance for business – was too costly.  And so the developing world always ended up as a recipient.  But now we’re building a middle class, the most rapidly growing consumer sector, which creates a strong market for products.  This is the best opportunity for development.”

Kevin Martin

Acumen Fund Fellow working with d.Light, a low-cost solar lantern company providing lighting to families in developing countries.

“Africa’s challenges do not exist in silos: the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, for instance, is a function of culture, history, and economy as well as a dozen other factors.  Challenges such as these require holistic solutions which integrate the on-the-ground-reality faced by the continent.  I believe that the confluence of human centered design and modern technology is the most powerful tool the world has for generating the innovative solutions required to overcome these challenges.”

Jason Morenikeji

Project Director of The Clean Energy Company, building sustainable wind power solutions in Mozambique.

“There is this concept of African innovation which you see, especially in Mozambique, every time you go to a garage.  I’ll see a piece of equipment, welding machines, bits of metal and wound wire and it blows me away sometimes.  But innovation always comes from a specific need that’s inherent and if you bring that need from outside then it gets too convoluted in the way it’s translated. It almost has to happen itself over time.  So in terms of bringing innovation and new design concepts, it takes time on the ground to see how things work and you have to adapt what you’re bringing to the African innovation process.”

During our one-week stay, we’ll be staying with rural host families, engaging in cultural activities and ceremonies, and visiting the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, responsible for electrifying the reservation.  We’ll also be working on further developing our field skills, including:  energy and water usage and assessment, community health assessment, facilitating focus groups, cultural research methods, participatory design, etc.

To learn more about CataCAMP, or if you’re interested in supporting this program, please email heather(at)catapultdesign(dot)org.  We’re also welcoming visits with more organizations (non-profit, government entities, etc) during our stay.  Stay tuned for more updates!

The lack of financial capital isn’t a concession factor for most social ventures. Successful social ventures were born before the availability of seed funding for these ideas, and some of the coolest new organizations out there are funded by friends and family.  For these organizations there is no drain of funds that signifies the death of an idea.  When organizations are fueled by personal capital and sweat equity, the finish line gets hazy.

It’s an increasing dilemma. Consider the growing number of student classes working on social impact design projects. Stanford University’s Design for Extreme Affordability is one of the more renowned programs for graduate students in design, engineering, and business that connects student teams with a non-profit “client” for five months to develop a product solution serving the needs of bottom of the pyramid consumers. The class is responsible for spinning out a variety of social entrepreneurs – Ignite Innovations, d.light, Embrace, Driptech, to name a few.  Each of these organizations came into existence because their “client” was unwilling or unable to take the final idea forward.  Five months of work wasted?  It’s not hard to see why many student teams decide to implement the solutions themselves.

In addition to student teams, there are thousands of individuals and groups out there with ideas, solutions, or prototypes.  Each often building new organizations to support their solutions, some with more concrete plans than others.  The problem arises after these teams/individuals/groups develop a solution, but then become unsure what to do with it. Solutions, after all, still need to be implemented. Roadblocks prohibit these organizations from getting their solutions into the hands of people who need them. The usual culprits: lack of funding, on-the-ground presence or implementation partner, or the time and motivation required to drive activity.

A great case in point is the Pepper Eater, a device produced by Samuel Hamner and Scott Sadlon.  Their aluminum prototype uses a hand crank to crush chili peppers into chili flakes.  The prototype processes one kilogram of dried peppers in about thirty minutes, a fraction of the time required to do it by hand. The women in Ethiopia who’ve field-tested seem to like it, and have even purchased the prototypes.

But the designers behind the project are not ready to quit their day jobs to make pepper grinders.  They’re not interested in the complexities of building a company around this technology – they just want to see it end up in the hands of people that can and will.  But funders don’t give money to ideas without implementers.  Investors don’t fund ideas without a foreseeable return.  As a result, the Pepper Eater sits in development purgatory waiting for something to happen.

How to help them?  The only thing I could think of was to feature them in this blog to let everyone reading it know that they’re looking for partners to manufacture and distribute the design in Ethiopia. (Any takers?)  But it brings back the core issue Ken Banks raised in our conversation:  how do you know if you’re forcing an idea? And is there a place for the solutions that don’t make is past the roadblocks?

The irony is that a lot of people with ideas or interest in this field are asking how to get started. My answer for folks is usually fuzzy and unhelpful, but the most forthright answer I’ve heard came from Sally Osberg of the Skoll Foundation. She said, “If you’re asking that question, then you’re not ready. Get some experience, learn from those who are doing, and put yourself out there.”  It’s true. But now that we have many people getting started, the harder question to answer is: how do you know when to stop?

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This post also appears on NextBillion.net, a community of business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers and academics who want to explore the connection between development and enterprise.

Rob Anderson is the Managing Director of Fenton Communications NY and has a 20-year professional history passionately devoted to one ideal: to leave the world a better place than he found it. A nationally known expert on social marketing and one of the chief strategists behind the highly successful “truth” anti-smoking campaign, Anderson was previously the executive vice president for GolinHarris.  At GolinHarris he directed Change, the name of the company’s corporate citizenship, social marketing and cause branding practice, addressing some of society’s toughest challenges. In the public sector, Rob has worked with nonprofit and government agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, American Legacy Foundation, Home Safety Council, Special Olympics, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Ad Council, Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Graham Hill rose to fame as the founder of Treehugger.com, a leading media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream.  An advocate of social entrepreneurship, Graham is described as a serial entrepreneur himself, do-gooder and designer. Graham and the TreeHugger.com team joined the Discovery Communications family of networks as part of its Planet Green multi-platform, global environmental initiative. He also owns a product business that sells a New York souvenir he designed a few years ago, available in 175 stores including MOMA.

Rob and Graham are prominent members of their respective fields with reputations as industry leaders.  The entire Catapult team is excited to work closely with them on the next phase of Catapult’s growth.