Why Powasa Matters

Power: Is a must!

There is no question about whether access to electric power will be a key element to boost economic growth irrespective of the location. Expansion of power networks in rural areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America will last decades while costs are prohibitive. Fortunately, solar radiation in these areas can be as high to allow for a sustainable supply of renewable energy. The business model behind it will trigger future success for these off-grid solutions.

Electric power supply is one thing, access to a cleaner fuel another. Despite the intrinsic health impacts due to burning solid fuels and inhaling noxious fumes, rural people still depend on biomass (wood, cow dung), biomass derived fuels (charcoal) or on non-renewable fossil fuels such as kerosene. Purchase and collection of these is costly and tedious though. Another intrinsic effect of excessive wood usage is the ongoing de-forestation and the subsequent depletion and finally the erosion of fertile soil. Replacing these fuels with biogas which can be produced by anaerobic digestion of cattle dung or any other decomposable matter would point to a solution if the design and operation of the digesters met the local needs and the habits of the people and their budget constraints.

In spite of the success in Asia, bio-digesters have not yet come of age in Africa. Powasa, therefore will focus on this. Taking into account the needs of rural African areas, Powasa will help to deliver reliable and affordable digesters which will work within the existing cultural aspects that make Africa vibrant and unique.

Water: Make it safe and more abundant!

Water quality and quantity are issues rural people in the developing world have always faced. De-forestation and erosion of soil have an adverse effect on the water supply. Open defecation threatens the health of people via waterborne diseases. Despite progress made in policies related to measures for the poor such as installation of monitoring systems, very few of the sub-Saharan or poor Latin American countries provide sufficient financial support to reduce the disparity between the rich and the poor in the sanitation and water sector according to the MDG (Millennium Development Goals)

It is our belief that promoting boiling as one of the most suitable and most common household water treatment systems (HWTS) or adding disinfectants and flocculants, will not suffice to meet the millennium development goal 7 d: access to safe water and basic sanitation. And HWTS which would yield safe water but which deprive people of their ecological resources and have an adverse impact on their health (burning firewood) is not to be regarded as sustainable.

We did ask ourselves: if power could be made available cheaply (via abundant sunshine or harvesting wind energy) and we were training people to operate a piped water supply system, would that work in remote areas of Kenya, Rwanda or Tanzania or any other geography? Complementing the water supply system by harvesting rain water wherever possible and meaningful would be no big deal either

Sanitation: Contaminated water is not a matter of fate!

Amazingly, the belief that diarrhoea, and in particular diarrhoea in children, is not a disease is widespread among the most vulnerable populations. Available, yet scarce resources are not dedicated to improve water quality let alone to improve sanitation. Dozens of investigations deal with treatment of contaminated raw water but lack detail where, e.g., a faecal coliform contamination of the raw water came from and whether measures were undertaken to stop that. Notwithstanding the outcome of investigations that source interventions are less effective than household water treatment solutions, sanitation is an aspect to be dealt with when pondering how to provide a holistic concept to improve water quality and the living conditions of vulnerable people.

Facilitating rural people to take care of the sanitation themselves, requires a simple, yet efficient and appropriate technology. Applying basic treatment schemes which may consist of sedimentation, anaerobic fixed bed or upstream reactors and/or trickling filters will provide a flexible response to sanitation issues because these system are all scalable.