Clean water for everyone - quickly, effectively and sustainably
Having seen this TED-talk, where Michael Pritchard demonstrates how his invention, “The Lifesaver Bottle” turns filthy water into drinking water, and then reading the Facebook comments, I got to thinking:
“Why go asking for $ 20 billion to finance it? Ít’s ridiculous. Get a good business model instead, to create a sustainable solution.”
This is my suggestion how to finance the distribution and maintain the safe drinking water for people:
The key challenge is to have the bottles truly available whenever needed - without a lot of new money. We want new ones, new “refill cartridges”, we want them to go on being used, we want people to understand how long they work, and why they won’t work forever etc. This takes some education, and continoous coordination and adaptation.
To handle this kind of ongoing distribution problem, the free market is the best tool, and economic gain is the most enduring incentive known to man. One problem with the Lifesaver, if you want to sell it, is that it’s very longlived - but also quite expensive!
One way to solve it would be to have a product with smaller cartridges and lower initial cost, so that people with little resources can actually buy one - even if it doesn’t last very long, they won’t need as much money at any given moment. The cost per litre of water would still be acceptable.
Or, you can organise for people to buy the bottle collectively, which would also work.
The absolutely key element is this:
We have to use the existing power structures and incentives, to make sure the bottle, whether individual or collectively owned property, stays available, and doesn’t get lost or stolen etc., in areas where the rule of law is not always a given, where there is no good infrastructure etc,
In every social setting in the world there is a “chief” or a “boss”. Make sure this individual makes money providing the lifesaver bottle (or similar equally effective products) to people at a reasonable price - then you will find that people will start having fresh water and we won’t even have to finance the thing. It will finance itself, and be sustained because the chief makes money.
I got the notion of creating sustainability by making money for the local “chief” from Lars Kolind during a seminar. See The Second Cycle
Now, I’m guessing you may have some problems with this idea. Perhaps you will say:
“What if somebody fakes the product and starts deceiving people to make money?”
To which I’d respond: If somebody create a fake product and sell, then people will continue to get sick and even die, which will make it important to them to make certain themselves it’s the right product. Put it like this - if you exchange the cartridge, and get a “bad one” and then get a diarrhea - well, you know who sold it to you! It’s not like you’re worse off than you were before buying your first bottle, either. Forget perfect. This is about sustainability!
Or perhaps you will say:
“Hey! Everybody has a right to free drinking water! It’s a terrible thing to sell it, and thus deny the poorest people pure drinking water!!!”
To which I’d respond: Well, sure. I suggest the following test: You try to find funding to solve the problem through charity, and continuously keep up the service level so that as many people as possible get free water. I, on the other hand, start the process to sell lifesaver bottles along the lines above. Let’s keep track of how many people have good drinking water through your efforts, and mine, respectively, every half year onwards. What do you think the result would be?
Etiketter: Clean drinking water, Developing countries, Health, Lars Kolind, Lifesaver bottle, Michael Pritchard, Sustainability, TED