Disaster Response Mexico Project #35573

Clean Drinking Water For When Disaster Strikes

by Caminos de Agua

Clean Drinking Water For When Disaster Strikes

Project Report | Jun 25, 2020
Look at what we have built together

By Dylan Terrell | Executive Director

We could not do our work without you.

We’re in a daily fight here in central Mexico trying to help families and communities gain access to safe and healthy drinking water. Sometimes, in the midst of all of this, we at Caminos de Agua can forget one of the people most critical to our success – YOU!

Put quite simply, we couldn’t do any of our work without you and all of our other supporters and funders. So, on behalf of all our staff, local and international volunteers, and, most of all, the families and communities we work with in the field, I want to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

We also want to take this opportunity to share with you some perspective of what we have become because of your support. It’s something you should take pride in every bit as much as we do.

When we started out over nine years ago, we were very small. It was just me and a couple others working out of a friend’s house here in San Miguel. We started by collaborating with, and looking for ways to support, local community organizations. When we asked what the major problems were, the answer always seemed to be one word – “water.” We were told stories about a massive agricultural industry that is sucking up our finite water supply, which, in turn, is decreasing the water available for hundreds of thousands of people. We heard how this over-extraction of our shared water source leaves the remaining water contaminated with toxic levels of arsenic and fluoride – threatening the health of so many of our neighbors.

At first, we were maintained mostly by family and friends. But, as we grew, we were able to attract new individual supporters and foundations who shared our vision. This allowed us to hire our first professionally-qualified technology and community organization staff members in 2016 – the same year we moved into our first office and built our first water lab.

Little by little, we gained traction. We grew our water monitoring program – allowing us to identify where the biggest contamination and water scarcity problems were. We developed a way of working with communities based on building partnerships and empowering them to design and build their own clean water solutions. We constructed a unique and important network of collaborators – from the community level, to local government, to international and academic institutions. Through all of this, we have created a successful marriage between appropriate technical innovation and community impact, which has allowed us to increase the amount of clean water available to those most at risk – in the end, the reason we exist.

Today we are right on the cusp of several major developments that will have important impact on the fight for clean water:

This year we plan to embark on, by far, our biggest rainwater harvesting project ever – building hundreds of systems in more than 30 communities over the next 3-4 years.
We are doing the final full community testing on our internally-developed Groundwater Treatment System (GTS), which will effectively filter arsenic and fluoride directly from well water at the community level. We expect to begin deploying GTS in more communities by 2021.
Aguadapt, a low-cost water filter we began designing several years ago, won the Innovation Showcase Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2019. Aguadapt can be adapted to nearly any container in just minutes – making it ideal for emergency situations. We are currently developing plans to make this solution available throughout Mexico and beyond.
We have become a working member in several national coalitions that are actively working to monitor water contamination throughout the entire country, impact public water policy at the national level, and create integrated projects that expand water access to so many more.

You helped build this. All of this. We simply can’t thank you enough.

Many communities have little or no access to water

Every Global Giving donation helps

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A Project So Important Even Coronavirus Can't Stop I

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Feb 24, 2020
Collaborating with our partners leads to better technical solutions that save lives.

By Paco Guajardo | Associate Director

Aaron, presents Aguadapt to ASME judges

Caminos de Agua enters communities responsibly, through existing grassroots organizations and other NGOs already doing work on the ground. These partnerships are crucial to the way we work. They provide critical feedback on how our solutions are being used and, consequently, what changes need to be made. Through these partnerships we are able to develop technologies that are better aligned with users’ actual needs.

Last year, Caminos de Agua was recognized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for an adapter, which we named Aguadapt, which will allow our ceramic filter to be easily installed in any domestic container with standard plumbing parts, making it a perfect disaster relief response and an alternative to shipping bottled water in massive quantities (which is both innefficient and costly).

When looking to pilot Aguadapt, we immediately reached out to our partner, Bruno, who works with Concern America - one of our strategic partners in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. Concern America operates programs worldwide in impoverished regions – focusing on health, sanitation, education, and income-generation projects so that community members themselves become empowered to improve their own lives. It currently operates community-centered programs in Colombia, Guatemala, and the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico where we work with Bruno and his team.

In Chiapas, water is a chronic issue, especially among indigenous communities where waterborne diseases – caused by pathogens in the water supply – are common. Chipas is also one of the most marginalized regions in all of Mexico. To make things worse, many of these communities are far from health centers or hospitals. Our ceramic filter – the precursor to Aguadapt – removes 99.9999% of pathogens and bacteria and has been used for years by Bruno and Concern America with hundreds of families in Chiapas. Bruno explains, “we [Concern America] focus our work on mainly ethnic Tzotzil, Tzeltal, and Tojolabales communities, historically marginalized, internally displaced by conflicts, and which have always been the main target of oppression and exploitation.”

It was Bruno’s own use of our ceramic filter, and his design of the filter system that works for communities in southern Mexico, that ultimately helped lead to the design of Aguadapt. Our experience with Concern America is a great example of how feedback from our partners results in the creation of better solutions for the communities we are working with.

Today, we are excited to be in the process of piloting Aguadapt’s with the help of Bruno and Concern American with nearly 700 families in Chiapas.

Filters and adapters help families in Chiapas

Over 700 families get clean water with Aguadapt

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Nov 25, 2019
Water, Water, Everywhere, But Not A Drop To Drink

By Paco Guajardo | Associate Director

Allie and Aaron, R&D Coordinators present Aguadapt

On September 16th, 2017, a deadly Category 5 hurricane wreaked havoc on many Caribbean islands - including Puerto Rico. Out-dated, but crucial, infrastructure was destroyed. The islands flooded quickly. However, despite the abundance of water, access to safe drinking water became an urgent concern. The only solution available at the time – shipping in plastic bottles – was an inadequate response.

That same month, two powerful earthquakes shook Mexico. First, a magnitude 8.2 quake left many communities disconnected from their water sources in Southern Mexico. Days later, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the states of Puebla, Morelos, and Mexico City. Buildings collapsed throughout the region where hundreds of people died and thousands more were injured. One headline buried amongst the rubble was the sudden lack of water infrastructure to support a now vulnerable population.

A Call to Adapt

In the days following these disasters, Caminos de Agua received numerous requests for our ceramic filters. We were able to provide a limited response in Southern Mexico. However, at the time, we were a smaller organization and relied solely on our artisanal production. Furthermore, our filters were much too large to ship in the quantities that were desperately needed.

Due to these limitations, we were unable to respond to other requests. These catastrophic events were a wake-up call for Caminos. We started looking at the global impact of our technology development and during the next two years we took on the challenge to reach further.

We asked ourselves, how can we adapt our ceramic filters so they can be easily shipped and installed in any available domestic container in a emergency relief situation? Then, we took it a step further and started thinking about how we could also adapt our filter to deal with regionally-specific contaminants – from arsenic and fluoride in our region, to pesticides in Southeast Asia, lead in Flint, Michigan, etc.

One design iteration led to another, and by outsourcing production and thousands of hours of staff and volunteer work, we came up with Aguadapt. This innovation can be deployed for emergency relief and later transition to a permanent water solution for families. It received an awared form the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (for latest developments on Aguadapt clink on the Impact as Outcome link below).

The Time is Now

We must adapt to a world that will see more frequent and devastating natural disasters. This time, Caminos de Agua needs to be able to respond. Your donation enables us to provide safe drinking water next time disaster strikes – whether in our region, or hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.

As you plan your end of year donations consider donating to Caminos de Agua and make access to safe and clean water a reality for communities at risk.

ASME experts gave our team valuable input

Focusing on having a greater impact

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