If you’re reading this, you likely don’t have to worry that the water you drink today will make you too sick to go to work, or that it might kill your kids. This is largely because the introduction of water chlorination in the early 20th century virtually eliminated waterborne diseases in developed countries. Before we began using chlorine to treat our drinking water, thousands of US residents died every year from cholera, typhoid fever and dysentery.

Two years ago, CTI began helping communities in rural Nicaragua eliminate waterborne illness through chlorination–a solution that’s cheap, easy, and effective against most types of bacteria and viruses responsible for waterborne illness. We gathered a team of local organizations, health ministry officials and village volunteers, and working together, we’ve provided safe water for more than 150,000 people.

World Water Day

Today is International World Water Day: a day held annually on March 22 to recognize the importance of clean water, a day to focus attention on those who lack it, and—most importantly—World Water Day is a day to come together and DO SOMETHING about it.

We think everyone should have access to safe drinking water, especially children. But the reality is, 4,000 children will die today because of unsafe water, and no amount of reflection on World Water Day is going to change that, only action.

Will you to take action with us right now?

Will you join our efforts to bring safe water to 25,000 more Nicaraguans over the next four months? Since just one Water Chlorinator provides safe water for an entire community, a little money goes a long way:

• A donation of $50 funds safe water for five families
• A donation of $150 can deliver a water chlorination system to a village of 1,000 people

Your investment will improve lives for generations to come.

Thank you to our water supporters!

With support from individuals, Nicaraguan communities, foundations and corporations, together we’ve helped more than 65,000 people gain sustainable sources of safe water in the last year. We want to thank the following organizations for their collaboration and generous support:

• Pentair Foundation
• Project Redwood
• EOS International
• Self Help International
• Unity Avenue Foundation
• Hudson Daybreak Rotary
• Minneapolis City of Lakes Rotary Club
• Rotary Club of New Brighton/Mounds View
• New Richmond Rotary Club
• Rotary Club of Rice Lake
• St. Croix Valley Rotaract
• Rotary Club of St. Paul
• St. Paul Sunrise Rotary Club
• Siren/Webster Rotary Club
• Rotary Club of South Saint Paul

This article was originally published in CTI’s newsletter. Sign up now to receive monthly updates from CTI.

One of the challenges of eradicating waterborne illness in the developing world is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. What works well in one community isn’t going to be appropriate in another. Take CTI’s water chlorinator, for instance. Our chlorinator is designed to provide safe water for a community; it attaches to a gravity-fed water source that an entire village obtains its water from, like a water tank. In Nicaragua, where community water tanks are common, CTI Water Chlorinators provide safe water to over 150,000 people. But there are many parts of the world where families obtain water from less centralized sources, like nearby streams or lakes. For these families, CTI’s Water Chlorinator isn’t going to be much help.

In search of a small-scale water solution

To help individual families treat their water, CTI is exploring a smaller-scale water filtration system that can provide safe water for 8-10 people and meet the following criteria:

• Affordable
• Portable
• Does not require electricity
• Must produce safe drinking water within 2 hours
• Must produce a minimum of 15 gallons per day
• Must be certified as to its efficacy against waterborne pathogens
•  Must be easy to clean

We aren’t seeking to reinvent the wheel, so CTI’s water team has researched numerous technologies on the market that either meet the above criteria, or can be adapted. We’ve narrowed our focus on the Sawyer Water filter. We like the filter because it’s very affordable and it works exceptionally. Like most water treatment technologies, the filter does require occasional cleaning. Without cleaning, the water’s flow rate begins to decrease over time as the filter collects contaminates. In order to make the system easier for families to clean, we’ve permanently connected a backflush device that returns the filter to its optimal flow rate.

Testing in Nicaragua

Testing in Senegal

Field Testing in Senegal and Nicaragua

Two Prototype units are currently being field tested in Nicaragua and Senegal for flow capacity and ease of use. Thus far, feedback on performance has been consistently excellent. Users have reported the prototypes are effective, intuitive to use, and their rate of output is quite satisfactory. If the initial field tests continue to go well, CTI will likely explore wider distribution of the systems.

Siblings do the washing at Acopia San Francisco Uca, a major coffee plantation and wholesaler in Nicaragua. Behind them, community members build a CTI water chlorinator.

In rural Nicaragua, seasonal workers and their families travel long distances to work on coffee, corn and cocoa plantations for months at a time. The money they earn during this period is essential to their families’ welfare, but the lack of safe drinking water at plantations often causes serious illness—preventing seasonal workers from going to work and devastating families.

Access to safe water not only improves community health, it increases incomes too. In fact, every $1 invested in improved water and sanitation yields an average of $4-12 for the local economy.

Because communities ability to earn money is so dependent on safe water, many plantations in Nicaragua are installing CTI’s Water Chlorinator. We are currently providing safe water to more than 12,000 seasonal workers in Nicaragua. With access to safe water, parents can earn wages, kids can attend school, and families in general have better lives.

1) The hungriest people grow food for a living

Global hunger and poverty are largely a rural phenomenon. 70% of the developing world’s extremely poor people are in rural communities and work in agriculture. Developing world farmers rarely have access to electricity or fuel, so they must plant, harvest and process their crops by hand. They barely produce enough food to survive, which is why they’re often referred to as “subsistence farmers.”

2) We’re growing plenty of food

We are currently growing enough food to feed everyone in the world, but roughly 1/3 of the food produced for human consumption gets lost or wasted. By losing so much food, we are missing an opportunity to feed our world’s growing population.

In many African countries, at least 25% of the total cereal crop is lost after harvest, usually due to a lack of storage and efficient post-harvest processing technologies. Our Executive Director, Roger Salway, is in Senegal meeting with farmers that have received our new Grain Processing Suite: a manually-operated stripper, thresher and winnower captures more than 90% of pearl millet grain at a rate 10x faster than traditional processing methods. Check out our blog for more on Roger’s journey.

3)   Dirty water exacerbates poverty

Clean water has a direct tie to a community’s economic wellbeing. Every $1 invested in improved water and sanitation yields an average of $4 – $12 for the local economy.

In rural Nicaragua, we help villages install our Water Chlorinator—an inexpensive device that produces safe water for an entire village for just pennies per day. The project is saving lives, helping kids go back to school and allowing parents to return to work. We are providing safe water for 135,000 in Nicaragua, and we plan to double our impact by the summer of 2014.

4) We already know how to fix it

Investing in agriculture is, hands down, the most effective method of reducing poverty. Growth in agriculture is 2x more effective at reducing poverty than any other type of development effort.

Unfortunately, our investment in agriculture is declining. USAID allocates just 5% of funds to agricultural programs, and globally, less than 6% of official development assistance supports agriculture (down from 17% in 1982).

5)   Poverty is declining, and we can be the generation that eliminates it

Global poverty isn’t inevitable—it’s dropping in every region of the developing world. In 1990, 43% of people in the developing world lived on less than $1.25 per day—today, it’s only 22%—meaning nearly a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the past 20 years.

We have an opportunity to build on this historic progress.

Visit our website right now, and invest $10 in the fight to erase poverty for good.

$10 is the amount of money the average American throws away in uneaten food every week. It may not be much money to us, but $10 can go a long way in the developing world. So let’s put that $10 to good use!

This article was originally published in CTI’s newsletter. Sign up now to receive monthly updates from CTI.

Our Executive Director, Roger Salway, has just arrived in Senegal where he’ll visit the first recipients of CTI’s new Grain Processing Suite: a manually-operated stripper, thresher and winnower that help farmers capture more than 90% of their pearl millet grain at a rate 10x faster than traditional processing methods. Our partners at the National Business Cooperative Association have distributed the suites to six communities in Senegal as part of a Farmer-to-Farmer program funded by USAID.

Many of the pearl millet growers Roger will visit are the same farmers who tested and evaluated early prototypes of the grain tools. During those field trials, the farmers were enthusiastic about the equipment, which they saw as an opportunity for a better future. At a demonstration with a rural village in November 2011, pearl millet farmer Ndiayne Keur spoke up,

“80-90% of the families depend on traditional methods to process, if technology like this were made available, a whole region could benefit, let’s be honest this is a survival tool.”

The prototypes received unanimous approval from farmers during field tests, so we are anxious to learn more about how the completed designs have been received.

Teff is so small, the seends are less than 1 mm in diameter

Roger will also visit fonio farmers in Senegal to learn more about their post-harvest processing practices. Fonio is a small-seeded grain that grows throughout West Africa. Many researchers are beginning to encourage farmers to grow more traditional crops like fonio because they are better adapted to local climates, and are often much more nutritious than wheat or corn. But many traditional grains like fonio or teff—which is native to Ethiopia—are also exceptionally small (see photo), which makes them very difficult for farmers to process by hand.

CTI has been asked by several farmers and organizations to explore whether we can help reduce the drudgery and waste associated with the traditional processing of small-seeded grains. So we are beginning our research where we always start, by talking to farmers directly.

In 2003, CTI volunteers Nancy and Steve Laible started a program in Bangladesh to help village children gain access to primary school. When they met some of the children they were helping, they were inspired to do something proactive about the nutrition of the village children. In 2005, they introduced CTI’s grinder to the village and helped a group of women launch a successful peanut butter enterprise that’s still going strong.

The picture of little girls having lunch on a bench was taken in Bangladesh in 2003. The girl on the left is Martina and on the right is Ponina. Nancy and Steve have met with these two girls every year since 2003. Today, Martina and Ponina are in grade level 8. They speak both Bangla (their first language) and English fluently. They act as ‘translators’ for Nancy and Steve when they walk the villages of northwest Bangladesh. Steve, jokes: “If you have trouble learning a second language, just raise your own translators. It only takes 9 years.” Martina and Ponina are healthy and happy young ladies who are determined to continue their education. Their progress in life has been helped in large part by the programs and projects of CTI and collaborative groups in Bangladesh.

The CTI volunteer work of Nancy and Steve in Bangladesh has now expanded to include the development of a Education and Technology (EAT) Center, a four classroom building with a model food preparation area for continuing research on post-harvest technology. They are actively seeking collaborators and sponsors for further EAT Center development.

In December, I was part of a Engineers Without Borders (EWB) team from South Dakota State University that traveled to Carmen Pampa, Bolivia to install CTI’s Water Chlorinator.  Our EWB chapter has developed a five-year commitment to the Unidad Academica Campesina de Carmen Pampa (UAC-CP) and the surrounding community to help them meet their drinking and waste water needs.  The UAC-CP is a rural university that provides a BS-level education to young women and men who do not have that opportunity due to unequal access to education by the poor.

Our group installed two Water Chlorinators in parallel to treat the drinking water for the upper campus of the UAC-CP.  This drinking water serves about 300 students.  CTI’s Water Chlorinator operates by dissolving chlorine tablets in order to kill bacteria in the water.  The chlorine tablets are available in La Paz, which is a four-hour drive from the UAC-CP.  The parallel installation of the two chlorinators allows the users flexibility in the amount of water treated and the concentration of chlorine, as well as providing system redundancy.

Everything went well with the installation process, and everything has been up and running for almost a month.  Our EWB team plan to return over the summer to follow up on the chlorinator.  If everything is working well, and the people like the drinking water, we plan to install another chlorinator system for the lower campus and the surrounding community.

Greg Tanner

Greg Tanner is a senior Mechanical Engineering major at South Dakota State University and president of the EWB SDSU student chapter.

He spent the summer of 2011 interning with CTI.

CTI Executive Director Roger Salway and villagers inspect pearl millet grain that’s been processed with CTI’s new grain tools.

When I met Astou, a young woman from a rural village in Senegal, West Africa, she told me she wasn’t interested in the future that had been laid out for her. The man who wants to marry her, she told me, “wants me to spend my day pounding a mortar and pestle.” In Astou’s village, and throughout much of the developing world, women and girls still rely on rudimentary tools like a mortar and pestle to thresh and grind their grain. The work is long and exhausting, and in the end, much of their harvest is blown away in the wind or dropped in the dirt.

Astou is the head of a women’s organization in her community. She’s smart, ambitious, and determined to build a future for herself that doesn’t include working in the fields from dawn until dusk and having to choose between pulling her children out of school to work or risk the family going hungry. Like so many of the women I’ve met in the developing world, Astou isn’t settling for poverty. She hasn’t given up on the idea that she can have a better future—and neither have we.

I was in Astou’s village last December field testing CTI’s new grain processing tools with pearl millet farmers. We knew from preliminary trials that the tools could nearly double farmers’ yields and increase their efficiency tenfold. But we also knew that we couldn’t call our new grain tools a success until they’d been approved by the farmers they were designed for.

The farmers in Senegal were overjoyed when they saw what our tools can do. Women told us that access to more efficient farming tools mean much more than additional food and time, it means the opportunity to increase their incomes, send their kids to school and start businesses—the opportunity for a better future.

Compassionate and thoughtful engineering can provide real pathways out of hunger and poverty. Just as those of us living in wealthy countries have benefited from innovations in science, agriculture and technology, I believe that we can do profound good when we use our skills and knowledge to give developing world communities a hand up.

For more than thirty years, CTI has been providing practical tools that give impoverished communities the chance to overcome their food and water challenges. In 2012, we’ve given thousands of Nicaraguans sustainable sources of safe water, we’ve empowered farmers with post-harvest tools that help them raise their standard of living, and we’ve developed several exciting new technologies that we believe will radically transform lives.

I invite you to join us and support our mission to innovate for the greater good. Because while innovation alone can change our world, only innovation paired with compassion can save our world.

Sincerely,
Roger Salway, CTI Executive Director

This letter was originally published in CTI’s 2012 Annual Report. Email cti@compatibletechnology.org if you would like to receive a copy of the Annual Report.

In a recent post on the Global Agriculture Development Initiative’s blog, CTI Senior Advisor Alexandra Spieldoch writes about post harvest losses and the need for technologies that can address this food waste and eliminate a major contributor to global hunger.

“There is little reliable data on post-harvest loss (PHL) and until recently it hasn’t played a big part in agricultural investment strategies. Only four percent of development assistance goes to agriculture and little of it for post-harvest programs. In light of high prices and lack of food availability, there seems to be new recognition that the world community can do more to prevent post-harvest loss as a means to meet world food demand.

In one of the most comprehensive reports to date, Missing Food: the Case of Post-Harvest Loss in Sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank, the UN FAO and the UK Natural Resources Institute indicate that over 4 billion dollars of grain are lost annually in Sub Saharan Africa, which is enough to feed 48 million people for 12 months. PHL equals half of the region’s annual grain imports, and exceeds the total amount received through food aid over the last decade.  More investment in post-harvest technologies in Africa has great potential to improve food security as well as improve the lives of poor farmers. Helping small-scale women farmers get access to innovative, affordable tools that help them harvest, store and process their crops is a game-changer for development.”

Check out the full article on the  Global Agricultural Development Initiative’s Global Food for Thought Blog.