PlayPumps: Clean Water Merry-Go-Round

I have a friend who grew up peddling a bike to watch TV. Her Dad had read an article about producing electricity with peddle power. He rigged up a bike, a battery and a timer. Then he plugged the TV into the contraption. You could only watch as much as you were willing to bike.

She learned to love books as a result. But that’s not the idea I’m going with here.

PlayPumps International has come up with a way to harness the power of children to produce clean water. Seems almost too simple. They drill the well. Build the pump and storage tank and hook it up to a merry-g0-round. The kids play on it and water pumps into the storage tank.

It’s like a windmill on it’s side using kid power instead of wind.

I really like the fact that the pumps are self sustaining. Local people get trained and paid to care for it. Billboard advertising on the sides furnishes revenue to keep it going up to 20 years.

The goal is to put up 4,000 of the pumps in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2010. They’ve got over 1,000 in already.

There are lots of ways to help this effort. Subscribe to their YouTube channel here. Go to their web site here. Follow them on Twitter. Or join the Facebook cause.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Learn how you can help save a child’s life (namaste-land.blogspot.com)
• To Be Thankful for Clean Water (boomercafe.com)
• World Water Week: Q&A; With the NRDC Water Team (takepart.com)

• Share/Save