Public Funding for Challenges Worldwide Limited

Water is a versatile resource that is vital to human health. Although it has many uses in medical procedures and treatments, it can be difficult to obtain the correct quality and at the required quantities of water in some locations in the world. These limitations disadvantage African communities and can be attributed directly to the reduced quality of treatments women receive, leading to secondary infection and death. Clean Water Designs has a mission to develop the technology to bring the highest quality water to where it's needed. In that pursuit, they have developed a patent pending technology that allows Medical Grade Water to be produced both energy and space efficiently, in greater quantities than the competition, and at reduced costs for medical facilities. Therefore, allowing this vital resource to be available on tap at hospitals and health clinics throughout Ghana. In this partnership project, they will further develop their technology and produce a bespoke product for the Ghanaian medical facilities, taking into account the unique challenges and requirements, making it fit for purpose for both centralised hospitals and local health clinics.

For rural communities in Malawi land degradation and the impacts of climate change and natural hazards are key livelihood challenges. The region of Chikwawa is especially prone to environmental strains as it is dryer, lower, and more arid than other regions of the country. Salinity in groundwater and soils threatens the region's already strained arable land resources and vegetation. Our innovation restores degraded land, turning salinized soils into highly profitable and healthy ecosystems without using any freshwater. We do this by using saline groundwater from traditional wells and modern boreholes which have become saline over time, or those that have been dug into deposits of saline water. While these 'saline wells' may no longer be in use, due to their high salinity levels, this project uses them to build ecosystems-based saltwater farms in which nutritious crops and aquaculture are combined in circular production models. SACA Malawi follows on from projects led by the team in the last two years in countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam which addresses similar threats, and implements innovative land management practices for the integrated restoration of saline wells to restore degraded land, and create invaluable ecosystems that strengthen the climate resilience of rural communities.

Beyond Waters's "Scaling Rural Access to Water" project uses Human Centered Design to understand the views of actual and potential customers and stakeholders in order to refine and re-test the design of its products and services as it seeks to increase access to water in rural Malawi. The improved designs of the pumps, the credit systems that make them financially accessible, the maintenance ecosystem that keeps them functioning and the routes to markets through partner groups that come out of this process, will then be brought together into a prototype business plan that will inform how Beyond Water scales up its operations in order to make water accessible and reliable across all parts of rural Malawi while also building a financial viable social business that is owned by its staff and reinvesting any surpluses generated rather than extracting profits for shareholders. The project will therefore have a significant secondary aim of developing a way of working that is more effective and more sustainable in providing water to poor communities in general and the socially excluded within them than the current model in which infrastructure is given to communities who then struggle to ensure its maintenance and functionality.