Trevor Field and the PlayPumps of Africa
| Case Code: LDEN057 Case Length: 21 Pages Period: 1998-2008 Pub Date: 2009 Teaching Note: Available |
Price: Rs.500 Organization : Roundbout Outdoor, Playpumps International Industry :Social Sector Countries : Africa Themes: Entrepreneurship, Social Entrepreneurship, Base of the Pyramid |
Abstract Case Intro 1 Case Intro 2 Excerpts
Water, Sustainability & Child's Play
In 2007, the PlayPump Water System (PlayPump) was nominated for the prestigious National Design Award, presented by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Though the water system failed to win the design award, it had won many hearts across the world ever since its launch in the mid-1990s, due to its ability to solve one of the most pressing problems in peri-urban and rural areas of Africa - water. In Africa, the water crisis is quite severe with around 40 percent of Africans lacking access to potable water supply. In addition to the deaths and economic loss caused by the lack of access to water, women and girls, on whom the burden of obtaining water for the family falls, have to trek long distances and spend hours collecting water from dams, springs, rivers, streams, and farm reservoirs. Where such traditional sources of water are not available, they have to rely on bore-wells, toiling hard over hand pumps. While this is back-breaking work, alternatives such as use of diesel, petrol or electric pumps are too costly to install and maintain.
They have also to contend with the fact that hand pumps break down often and remain un-repaired for a period of time. "By some estimates, 35 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa's improved water sources are out of service at any given time, mainly due to hand pump breakdowns. When broken pumps aren't repaired, communities are forced to return to unsafe water sources," wrote Geoff Hopkins, an operations analyst for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in Johannesburg, South Africa. Since this responsibility is linked to gender, women and girls spend a disproportionate part of their time hauling water - time that could be better spent with family or on economic activities, or in school.
According to experts, in many regions of sub-Saharan Africa, women and girls have to trudge an average of 8 kilometers to the nearest water source every day, and haul back containers of water weighing about 40 pounds. The absence of improved water supply has not only led to gender inequality but also affected the growth potential of the region, they said. The PlayPump was a child's roundabout (merry-go-round) attached to a water pump, a storage tank, and a tap. As children played on the merry-go-round, the system pumped water to the storage tank and communities living nearby could use this clean water. The four surfaces of the storage tanks also doubled up as billboards for commercial and public education/social messages...
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