Recent Interview with water.org Founders

Here is a recent Charlie Rose interview with Matt Damon and Gary White, co-founders of water.org about the global water crisis.  It runs about 30 minutes.

                    http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12577

Gates Foundation makes poop a priority, puts toilet innovation front and center

Posted at 06:05 PM ET, 08/15/2012

By Emi Kolawole

Bill Gates, right, looks at a device that uses solar energy to treat human waste, as he tours the "Reinventing the Toliet" Fair, Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012, in Seattle. (Ted S. Warren - AP)

Bill Gates wants your ideas — ideas to improve the one thing most people probably don’t like to think about until they have to: the toilet.

That’s right, there’s a global problem when it comes to the bathroom throne: not everyone has access to one. More specifically, they lack access to clean sanitation services.

In July 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced an initiative to reinvent the toilet, along with $265 million in grants spread across a variety of efforts to spur greater innovation in sanitation.(more...)

THE HUNGER PROJECT- Oaxaca

I am behind the curve for posting, but I have been very busy.  July 26 I flew to Mexico City to Meet with THE HUNGER PROJECT- Mexico to go on a six day site visit to the Sierra Alto region of the Mazateca near San Jose Tenango.  San Jose Tenango (N18 09.046, W96 43.024) is located in the northern rain forest mountains of Oaxaca.  This trip was focused on visiting four remote communities and performing a site analysis.  The site analysis included many challenges and opportunities.

• Water and sanitation
• Clean cook stoves
• Improving the housing
• Trail improvements
• Understanding their agricultural practices
• Their coffee production

This is a short list of the areas I focused my attention to.  

The trip was AMAZING in that to get to two of the communities we hiked for several hours on some of the most difficult trails I have ever been on. (Blogger will not insert the photo in the correct orientation, it is rotated 90 degrees)!

THE HUNGER PROJECT has been working in these four communities: Rancho Pineda, Cerro Alto, Genova, Piedra de la Luz, for the past several years and now the communities are organized enough to bring i n the technical experts.

This is a GREAT opportunity for us as this is a large long term project starting in these four communities and the vision is to expand to over 100 communities.

After the site visit I then spend a few days in Mexico City (D.F.) working with THE HUNGER PROJECT and eating tacos :)


I am in the middle of writing up the site visit analysis, thus I will post more over the next few weeks.  Hopefully I can find a "workable fix" to the rotated images problem, so you can see the communities.

H2020 - Water Poverty Initiative

H2020’s Water Poverty Initiative uses mobile devices to collect data on water quantity, quality, access and price in communities.  We combine this “crowdsourced” information with data from other sources (like water poverty reports and satellite images) and publish it using a map-based format (more...)

Reinventing the toilet is Bill Gates's new mission

NEW DELHI: Reinventing a toilet that has an operational cost of $0.05 per user, per day, that does not rely on water to flush waste and does not discharge pollutants is Bill Gates' latest mission. According to him, no innovation in 200 years has saved more lives than the toilet.

But the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says 2.6 billion people still don't have a safe "affordable way to poop".

Speaking to TOI on Thursday, Gates said the best toilet right now is the flush toilet and everything else is vastly inferior. "One of my ultimate dreams now is to reinvent the toilet - find a cheaper alternative to the flush toilet that does not require running water, has smell characteristics better than the flush toilet and is cheap."....more

The Future of Water: The Slingshot

Dean Kamen is possibly the world's greatest living inventor. Although he has been well-known among futurists for years, he rose to wider fame when he invented the Segway in 2001. His inventions also include the world's first wheelchair capable of climbing and descending stairs, and the world's first drug infusion pump which is used to provide diabetics with insulin on an as-needed basis. Kamen is remarkable because unlike most inventors, he does not work under the umbrella of a large corporation, university, or government agency. He is truly a DIY innovator....(more)

Africa's Hidden Water Wealth

By ALAN MacDONALD
Published: June 17, 2012

FOR a continent where more than 300 million people lack access to safe drinking water, Africa is sitting on a lot of it.

The journal Environmental Research Letters recently published a set of maps of groundwater resources in Africa, the results of two years of research led by the British Geological Survey and financed by the British Department for International Development. The research showed that in Africa the volume of water naturally stored underground within the cracks and pores of rocks is much larger (possibly 20 times more) than the 8,000 cubic miles of water visible in lakes and rivers...more