Children's Merry-Go-Round Inspires Idea for Water Pump Systems in Africa

A defining moment in Trevor Field's mission to provide clean water to people in Africa came when he stumbled across a simple scene: a group of women standing around a windmill-driven pump, waiting for the wind to blow so they could get water. "I just thought, ‘No, this is a pathetic situation to be in,'" said Field, who lives in South Africa. "And ever since then I've sort of had a mission in my head to try and help rural people to get clean drinking water."

That mission took a fortuitous turn at an agricultural fair when he found a water pumping system driven by a children's merry-go-round. Field saw the potential in the device, bought the rights and leveraged his advertising background to come up with the first PlayPump system, which uses a merry-go-round to pump water into an elevated tank, where billboards are sold for advertising space.

Exclusive interview with Trevor Field after the jump...

With that design, Field put in his first two pumps in 1989, and today PlayPumps has installed 1,600 pumps in Sub-Saharan Africa. At $14,000 per pump, Field has raised a lot of money, and working with local governments they now plan to expand into Tanzania and Kenya.

Q: What inspired you to get involved--was it seeing those women at that windmill?

A: Yeah, that was the start to get me going, but then there's a whole load of other stuff that I've sort of stumbled on along the way. For instance, women and young girls do have a disproportionate disadvantage from an education point of view, especially young girls. They have to get water before they go to school, so they miss out on their education, because they're always late. Young girls entering into puberty--they don't go to school if they haven't got any water there, they got no facilities to wash their hands, they got no decent toilet systems, so a lot of [them are out] for a week every month whilst they're menstruating. That's pathetic, you know, and we can change that.

Q: Could you give a broad overview of why of getting access to clean water is an issue in a lot of areas you work in?

A: It's quite simple: It's just distance and it's finances. If you want to put electricity into an area... say it's like 100 kilometers from Los Angeles, it wouldn't be difficult for the municipality or the government to put up telegraph poles and run the power in overhead. It's easy to get it there... and it would be fairly inexpensive ... Water has got to go underground, that's the problem. So you've got to dig trenches, put pipes in, put repeater stations, put filtration systems, the whole thing... It's just economics.

The reason why the PlayPumps and hand pumps in general are a good solution is that they are a standalone solution directly in the village where you're trying to get the water. You don't have to bring it in from anywhere - if you've got water there underground then you can use this system.

Q: When it comes to getting water into a lot of these rural communities, who are the big players? Is it governments, NGOs...

A: Yeah, it's a combination of all of those. All governments tend to do [standard] water treatments. You know, they can borrow money from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and those guys will lend a country millions and millions of dollars for projects. And they'll put in a massive water scheme, like a big dam and a reticulation system. ... NGO's use different methodologies for extracting water from the ground. They use traditional hand pumps if it's a small community, they use solar powered pumps, they sometimes use windmills, sometimes use diesel pumps--whatever turns them on, whatever they think is the right intervention.

But in Africa all of these interventions, including us, all have got disadvantages somewhere down the line. ... The solar panels get stolen all the time, and you can't repair them if they've been stolen. My pumps do break down. Everything breaks down... but you know we can get out there and we can repair the pump.

Q: What's one fact about clean water or access that people might now know?

A: The big thing that we've noticed is that children are in school. That's the first thing--especially the girls. Actually you've got more children at school, learning , getting a better education with a better future and a better job possibility. [Along with] that the teachers--I mean, the teachers drink the same water as the kids. Teacher gets sick, can't teach the kids. So it's a cumulative thing that we notice.

The other thing is, as soon as there's water on site, next thing they're doing they're growing vegetable gardens. And once you've got vegetable gardens, you've got a little economy. Not that the pump is an irrigation device, it's not. We've got only one function: our mission statement is that we provide clean, safe, tested drinking water that we know is 100% safe.

Q: If you had unlimited resources tomorrow, what do you think you would do with it?

A: What we'd do is accelerate our research and development program, because we've got lots of other interventions that we can link to the PlayPump system. For instance, we've got PlayPumps at the moment at our factory that are not just pumping water from a mechanical point of view, but they're generating electricity. So we'll be able to charge cell phones, [power] lights, run four laptops all day... and once we've got communications in with a cell phone, you just get broadband internet on a phone and increase the education again at the school.

Q: What do you find is the hardest thing you do when you're trying to implement a series of pumps? Is it finding the locations, is it the funding?

A: The toughest part is finding the locations and having good assistance from the recipient government, because a lot of the governments haven't got the capacity and they haven't got any kind of databases, they don't know where the boreholes are... it's finding a suitable site that is the most difficult thing that we have. It's not easy to raise funds but, you know, we're getting good at it.

Q: Is there something you can think of that someone in the U.S., wherever, can do quickly for five minutes, five bucks, to help out in some way?

A: There's a couple of organizations that we work with that take donations that are specifically tailored for PlayPumps. There's an outfit in England called Global Ethics, and they sell water, they've got bottles of mineral water - all their profits come to Roundabout Outdoor, to put PlayPumps in the ground. From a UK point of view, people just buy this water and know that by buying this water they're doing some good for the Africa people. It's not available in the States at the moment, so that's a pity.

Anybody in the U.S. can donate to PlayPumps international, which is a 5013c in Washington, D.C. and they've got a website. You can go to Give and Gain--any of the donation sites will accept donations for PlayPumps specifically.

Q: Is that the most effective way to help out?

A: I think it is, yeah. We have lots of people who are really keen and excited about the PlayPumps system, because, you know, it's a good system and people really get turned on by just looking at it and envisaging what it can do, and they all want to come over here and roll up their sleeves and get the spades and shovels and dig holes and that kind of stuff, and it's really noble, but from a practicality point of view it's, well it's not safe to put people in a really remote, rural environment where they're going to sleep in a tent. They could get malaria and all sorts of things--even though the concept is good, it's not the ideal situation, and plus will be depriving the locals of jobs. It's just not what we're trying to do.

Q: But if I am one of those people and I really love this idea, what's a long-term thing I can do?

A: The best thing is to sort of hold fundraisers - and we've got lots of really great people in the states and Europe and all over that do the most amazing things. We've got a lady called Virginia Prifty, and she lives in a small little house in Wales, in the U.K., and her son Laurence, he passed away when he was seven years old. He had a disease that was incurable. Virginia just wanted to preserve his name and she's been raising funds for PlayPumps ever since this happened. And at $14,000 per pump, she's raised the money for 35 already on her own, just one woman sitting in her house in Wales. She's raised a lot of money.

People are having marathons, people walking 5 kilometers with a 20-liter water container on their heads like African women do just to prove that they can do it, all sorts of people having fundraisers with people playing music, all sorts of things.