PlayPumps – An unusual innovation in “Water”
Continuing the Nightmare at Noon series on “Water“, in this part, an unusual innovation to tackle the challenge of water accessibility.
I first heard of PlayPumps about two years ago when I stumbled on their site while looking for something else on the web. It was a serendipitous discovery and the innovation stayed at the back of my mind.
Children on PlayPumps
As I conceived this series around “Water”, I felt that the story of PlayPumps was one worth telling. Here is Ginger Coleen writing about PlayPumps in Natural News (emphasis added):
…The PlayPump is a merry-go-round that doubles as a water pump.
The spinning of the merry-go-round pumps clean water from underground into a 2,500 liter tank, standing seven meters above the ground. A simple tap makes it easy to draw water. All excess water is diverted from the storage tank back down into the borehole. The pump is able to produce up to 1,400 liters of water per hour at 16 rpm from a depth of 40 up to 100 meters.
Women and girls in Africa are primarily responsible for collecting enough water each day for cooking, drinking and cleaning. This often means hauling heavy water containers for many miles taking, on average, three hours a day. The weight of the water containers is equivalent to about 44 pounds (20 kg). Many young girls and women must walk as much as six miles every day to retrieve water for their families. Some have to make the trip twice.
In much of the world, we take water for granted. We turn on a faucet and out it comes. We flush a toilet and think nothing of the amount of water it takes for that flush. When you flush that toilet, you’re using the same amount of water that one person in a less developed country uses all day to wash, clean, cook and drink.
…Each of the four sides of the above ground PlayPump(c) tank contains billboards. Two of the four billboards contain health and educational messages, while the other two are for consumer advertising that generates enough revenue to pay for pump maintenance.
Benefits obtained from the PlayPumps are huge. Of course, the health benefits are the most prominent from improved water supplies. However, it also frees up the time normally used for obtaining water, allowing women and children to use this time more productively. Now, children can attend school and gardens can be grown to produce healthy food for families. Poverty and hunger become a thing of the past.
Unfortunately, PlayPumps ran into operational issues after an exciting start. The company appeared to have under-estimated the challenge of maintaining the pumps and keeping them operational. Earlier this year, PlayPumps became part of Water for People, an NGO focused on developing locally sustainable drinking water resources & sanitation facilities in developing countries. There are about 1200 PlayPumps installed in Africa today…and hopefully there will be many more as the technology continues to improve and maintenance becomes less of a challenge.
In the meantime, if you have come across any interesting innovation(s) in water supply, purification and/or delivery, please leave a comment below.
P.S. For the more curious, here is some information on how the PlayPump works.
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From Can Silicon Valley Save the World?:
Before the Soccket, there were PlayPumps, an innovation hailed by Laura Bush and AOL co-founder Steve Case that would use the power generated by kids spinning on a merry-go-round to deliver water. PlayPumps cost four times what a regular water pump did. Aid workers reported that they broke and were hard to fix. And, according to an analysis by the Guardian, it turned out that kids would have to “play” for 27 hours a day to meet the target of delivering water to 2,500 people per pump.