WATER

Water is essential to all forms of life, and supplying it in sufficient quality as well as quantity for drinking, domestic use, and farming is necessary to our survival. More than one billion people are deprived of water that meets these minimum criteria. Women in developing countries are particularly affected, as they bear most of the burden of hauling water from the source, often many kilometers away, to their homes—which deprives them of time for education, healthcare, and livelihood activities that can alleviate entrenched poverty.

Of the world’s poor, roughly 70% live in rural areas, and depend on agriculture as their main source of income. Designers have devised a variety of extremely low-cost micro-irrigation tools to extend the growing season for these small-scale farmers. The resulting increases in crop yield and income have proven to be one of the fastest and most effective ways for the rural poor to emerge from poverty. The simple human-powered treadle pump has had the most significant impact in the developing world: over two million treadle pumps installed worldwide have been cheaply manufactured and maintained.

Innovators and leaders in this emerging field work directly with the farmers, listening to their needs and conducting extensive field tests to better understand what they require. Since a rural farmer’s plot in the developing world is an acre or smaller, technology is miniaturized to fit the land and designed to be easily expandable as their income grows and they purchase more farmland. Updating older and outmoded inventions with new materials can yield highly affordable irrigation technologies. Farmers growing high-value crops ready for market transform into micro-enterprises.

These projects are prime examples of interventions which act locally to create life-changing opportunities and break cycles of poverty that have endured for hundreds of years.