A video about alternative pump methods.
Water pumps in Africa are hard to work they take a lot of effort. Heres a link to a alternative way of generating the wheel.
Taken from the website:
In rural villages across South Africa, some 5 million people don't have access to clean drinking water. To get a sense of the severity of the water scarcity there, you have to go back to the early 1800s when Europeans and others started colonizing the country.
Two hundred years on, after mass planting, adding to South Africa's growing population and you have a situation in which the competition for water has become fierce.
Which brings us in a roundabout way (no pun intended) to this week's Rough Cut -- reporter Amy Costello's surprisingly upbeat tale about a canny entrepreneur who decided to tackle South Africa's water woes in his own novel and enterprising way.
The women and children of the conunties used leaky and often contaminated hand-pumps to collect the water, then they carried it back through the bush in buckets weighing 40 pounds. It was exhausting and time-consuming work.
"The amount of time these women are burning up collecting water, they could be at home looking after their kids, teaching their kids, being loving mothers," Field tells Costello. He knew there had to be a better solution.
Field then teamed up with an inventor and came up with the "play pump" -- a children's merry-go-round that pumps clean, safe drinking water from a deep borehole every time the children start to spin. Soup to nuts, the whole operation takes a few hours to install and costs around $7,000. Field's idea proved so inventive, so cost-efficient and so much fun for the kids that World Bank recognized it as one of the best new grassroots ideas.
He reserves a spot for the national loveLife campaign, which helps educate children about HIV and AIDS. "We've got to get the message through to them before they become sexually active," he says. "It seems to be working."
In the film, Costello and producer/photographer Cassandra Herrman drive out to a small village where the taps have been dry for a week. There, a crew sets to work installing a play pump near a children's play area, boring 40 meters down until they hit the fresh water table below. As soon as the last colorful piece of the puzzle is in place, dozens of children show up to play -- much to Field's delight -- pumping cool, clean water to the surface as they spin.
The indefatigable entrepreneur wants to build thousands of these pumps to help water-stressed communities across South Africa, then expand to other African countries.
He says, "It would make a major difference to the children, and that's where our passion lies."
He says, "It would make a major difference to the children, and that's where our passion lies."
Jackie Bennion
Senior Interactive Producer
Senior Interactive Producer
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