By Paco Guajardo | Associate Director
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.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
