Clean Water | The Overview

One of the most common causes we hear celebrities talk about is providing clean water to those who don’t have access it. That being said… they rarely discuss what that looks like & how different parts of the world have different needs. I want to start this series off with a little discussion on the variety of clean water delivery methods I’ve documented over the last 7 years. 

The most commonly shown is the drilled hand pump well. These typically have either a long handle or a wheel which makes the pump work. The reason these are so common is that it guarantees clean water by drawing from an aquifer below, and they are relatively low cost for maintenance as there isn’t a lot of moving parts. Also, the parts which can break can easily be sourced in the nearest larger town/city at a hardware shop. In Burkina Faso, the cost of an installation is around $7,000us. While this isn’t crazy expensive, it isn’t super affordable either (which is totally understandable with the rig needed).

There are some parts of the world where drilling wells just isn’t feasible though. A perfect example that I've experienced is Nebobongo, DR Congo. This area is a mix of really bad roads that turn to mud with the excessive rain, along with very dense jungle which makes it almost impossible to get the big drilling rigs into these communities. However, this area has a lot of fresh water springs (900+ in one province alone). This provides water to those nearby, but they tend to get infiltrated by diseases from mosquitos and wildlife. Thankfully, protecting these water sources is fairly simple by covering them with a concrete box with a pipe sticking out one side for water to flow. Pressure builds up and creates a cleaner water source for people to draw from. This only costs about $750us.

Now we’re going big with irrigation systems…. something that is incredibly important in subsaharan climates like Burkina Faso, Mali, and others. 

There’s a lot of discussion about solar & everything amazing about it. There’s definitely a lot of positives, especially since it greatly reduces the amount of work people need to do for their water. However, this comes at great cost. A solar irrigation system installed in Poundou, Burkina Faso cost about $30,000us with the drilling of the well below it. It also has a very high repair cost, and many parts aren’t able to be sourced locally so the system could easily go down and be unusable for long periods of time. 

On the much simpler &  more cost effective end of irrigation systems, I’m thankful my dad is a out of the box thinking engineer. He recently designed this hand pump irrigation system which can be installed by any existing well. It uses the same gravity feed as the solar, but has a lot less moving parts. It can also be repaired using parts from any local hardware store, and only costs $2,500us.

Next week we’ll dig into a few more specific stories about how these have changed lives in various parts of the world!