Water is Child’s Play, But You Gotta Spin!

Water in Africa is precious, like life itself. Women and children, in most rural and poor urban communities all over the continent, trek tens of miles daily or pay dearly for a gallon. But an innovative pump is giving children in South Africa a more definitive role in bringing clean, sustainable water to their communities.

Powered by play, the PlayPump water system is a children’s merry-go-round attached to a water pump and storage tank. It provides easy access to clean drinking water, brings joy to children, and leads to improvements in health, education, gender equality, and economic development.

Hailed by the World Bank as “one of the world’s most innovative designs capable of providing self sustainable free clean water to poor communities, as well as being an effective delivery system for social messages”, the PlayPump system is a merry go round that pumps water from a ground source as children spin, and they like working hard at it. Talk of ingenuity! What’s more, it is a wonderful social media project: adverts are placed strategically on the equipment to warn on dangers of disease, including HIV/ Aids.

The clean water provided by the system is designed to save women and girls in the community the hardship of having to fetch and carry water from a stream or dam, which may be several hours’ walk away. Another purpose is to improve the health of the community by reducing or eliminating the threat of water-borne diseases such as cholera and bilharzia.

The system also enables the children in the community to spend more time at school by freeing up their time that would otherwise have been spent collecting water. Education officials claim that school attendance is also improved by reducing the number of sick days taken.

Sandra Hayes and Jill Rademacher, both working in PlayPump community projects in South Africa say the idea has been so successful that they had initiated entry into Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia. “Pilot projects will also be soon commenced in Lesotho, Malawi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda”, Hayes said.

US First Lady, Laura Bush, on her Africa trip last year, visited one such project in a school in Zambia and commented: “It runs on the energy of children at play. So it’s also a very fun piece of play equipment for children in the schoolyard.”

Peter Waldron, an engineer involved with the PlayPump, says children have developed additional social skills by playing on a simple device they normally would never see. The provision of potable water means the children are well hydrated, which is an essential ingredient to effective learning. At some schools, small fruit and vegetable gardens have been created with the obvious benefit of added nutrition for developing children.

The PlayPumps have been showcased in Chicago during the CoolGlobes art exhibition last September and in 2005, the innovation’s parent company, Roundabout Outdoor, won the Alcan Prize for Sustainability bursary to promote capacity building.

Innovations like the PlayPump are useful as water-related diseases are the leading cause of death in the world, particularly in Africa, and are responsible for over 6,000 deaths a day, and for 80 percent of all sickness in the world, according to UNICEF, tragedies that can easily be avoided.

It has been indicated that each PlayPump water pumping system installed directly benefits approximately 500 rural families, each consisting of (a conservative estimate of) 5 family members, costing an estimated $6 per head. This equates to about 2000 people whose lives may be improved by each PlayPump installation.

Invented and manufactured in South Africa, which is good because of the jobs created, the pumps already serve one million people and are poised to serve up to 10 million people in sub-Saharan Africa by 2010, Hayes said. As kids play on a PlayPump water system, water pumps in a capacity of up to 370 gallons per hour into a 660-gallon storage tank, easily accessible by the simple turn of a tap. This is almost effortless in comparison with other manually operated pumps available on the continent.

It is entirely sustainable and can reach into water well depths of 330 feet upwards and even recycle unused water. The system is particularly installed near communities and schools for optimum usage and improved sanitation and hygiene, which makes it even more interesting.

Hip hop artist and showbiz mogul, Jay Z, has made an MTV documentary “Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life” to raise awareness of the water crisis in southern Africa and the world with part of the proceeds benefiting PlayPumps.

Photo credits: PlayPumps International / Frimmel Smith