ARTICLE - INNOVATIVE AID - WATER

INNOVATIVE AID, OR HOW TO GET DRINKING WATER FROM A POLLUTED STREAM
(Guardian.co.uk) - By Paige McClanahan

From using sunlight to purify water, to foam houses that can withstand gales, new technologies are helping sharpen responses to humanitarian disasters around the world

In 1994, the Rwandan genocide triggered a huge influx of refugees into what was then eastern Zaire. Within 30 days, between 50,000 and 70,000 people – about 10% of the total refugee population – died of waterborne diseases, cholera and dysentery among them.

Those deaths did not need to happen, says Nathan Jones, who works for Hydration Technology Innovations. What those refugees needed was reliable – and immediate – access to clean water, and Jones says his company has the technology that can deliver it.

Their invention is called the HydroPack http://www.htiwater.com/divisions/humanitarian/about.html), and it has already been used in disaster situations across four continents. When empty, the 4in by 6in pouch looks like a paper-thin bit of plastic, but drop it into a water source – anything from a swimming pool to a rubbish-infested stream – and in eight to 12 hours you'll have 500 millilitres of water that is safe to drink. With its bright colouring and the little straw that comes attached, a swollen HydroPack looks surprisingly like a juice box, minus the glossy packaging.

The HydroPack works by forward osmosis, the same process by which plant roots extract water from the ground, and the water that ends up inside exceeds the clean-water guidelines set out by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The packs are fortified with sugar and salt to aid absorption, as well as flavouring to increase the appeal.

About 15,000 of the packs, which can be airdropped, were distributed in flood-ravaged western Kenya this year. They were also used in the aftermath of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile in 2010, as well as after the tsunami in Japan last year.

"It's a real paradigm shift in how you approach that initial phase [of disaster relief]," says Jones, adding that aid agencies and NGOs have long relied on chemical tablets, or even flown-in bottled water, to provide safe drinking water in emergency situations. "Bottled water is frequently used, but it comes with a really heavy cost, both financial in terms of the transport of it, but environmentally as well."

The HydroPack is just one of a number of new technologies that are helping the international community sharpen its response to humanitarian emergencies around the world. Jones and other innovators had the chance to sell their products to procurement experts during "pitch tank" sessions at the Aid & International Development Forum (http://www.aidforumonline.org/ ) , which was held last week in Washington.

The private sector is key to keeping aid agencies on their toes, says Maura O'Neill, the chief innovation officer at USAid. "Increasingly, we are co-creating solutions [with private companies] around a big, difficult development problem," she says. "A main part of their business objectives are overlapping increasingly with our development outcomes."

Other innovations that got an airing include Puralytics, a technology that uses sunlight to purify water, and pop-up greenhouses from a company called Got Produce? Its 300 square metre greenhouses, which double as water purification systems, can produce fruit and vegetables in only 30 days, operating completely off the grid.

Gigacrete, a Las Vegas-based company, makes easy-to-construct foam houses that can withstand winds of more than 300km/h, and the Leading Edge Group, which produces a brick-making machine that can churn out nearly a thousand blocks an hour, with clay-bearing dirt as the only input. Losberger, a German company, presented its hi-tech inflatable shelters that can be used to house hospitals in the field.

USAid is hoping to promote more of these kinds of advances through its Development Innovation Ventures fund, a government programme that operates like a venture capital fund for new ideas in development. So far, says O'Neill of USAid, the programme has received more than 1,200 applications and funded two-dozen projects, with many more in the pipeline. Any group or individual can apply for a grant, she says, whether they're based in the US or overseas.

The fund, which was launched in 2010 and is known as DIV, gave out its first grants last year. DIV divides its grantees into three stages: stage one projects are still in the proof-of-concept phase, and get up to $100,000; stage two projects are ready to scale up across an entire country, and receive up to $1m; while stage three projects are poised to have a multinational impact, and can get as much as $15m over several years.

The programme aims to fund "solutions that are several times more cost effective than current practice", USAid says on its website, and it is looking for innovations that can quickly be brought to scale: "We recognise that development breakthroughs can come from anywhere – a lab in a university, a local person who has deep contextual knowledge, or a passionate entrepreneur. Perhaps it will come from you."