About

Overview

Access to clean water should be a basic human right. However, eighty percent of the 700,000 citizens of Kuttanad, a region of coastal Kerala State in India, lack affordable, pure water. Waste, pesticides, and sewage have contaminated canal and groundwater and, if villages have access to a public tap, water flows from it only a few times a week. Private vendors sell clean water, but their prices are steep for the common village household. Women and children often end up with the burden of having to walk long distances to get water—usually polluted and unfit for consumption—for their drinking and cooking needs. The scarcity of clean water contributes to over 20,000 cases of water‐borne disease each year and millions of rupees in medical costs.

Rainwater for Humanity is a collaborative social enterprise initiated and led by Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design students aiming to address these problems. We plan to provide affordable rainwater harvesting tanks and filters to the people of Kuttanad by subsidizing the cost and offering micro-loans to villagers across the region. Currently, we are optimizing the design of the traditional system to lower the cost, incorporate locally-available materials, and modify the tanks for the region’s soil conditions and climate. Meanwhile, we will also educate the users on properly maintaining the tanks and ways to prevent water-borne diseases and safeguard local water resources. Each structure will then supply a family with enough water for their drinking and cooking needs throughout an entire year, eliminating disease and saving money and time that could be spent on education, income-generation, child care, and increasing the family’s quality of life.

Our goals stretch beyond just providing clean water: by creating employment opportunities, we plan to empower local women. We will set up a training and education program to equip women in the local self-help groups with masonry and marketing skills, so that they will sell and build rainwater harvesting structures for their neighbors themselves. The present women’s self-help groups provide women with the
social network they need, and this project will expand their entrepreneurial platform to harness economic and community health returns, improving local prospects for all. As the community gains the confidence and technical capability to invest in one resource, they will be able to move on and gain many more. Our project aims to enable the villagers of Kuttanad to help themselves build better lives.

Progress

We have started our efforts in the village of Achinakom, near the town of Kumarakom. A prototype, the first sub-surface tank in the region, will be built by the end of August 2009 and will supply drinking and cooking water for over twenty households. Along with our partners at Mahatma Gandhi University School of Environmental Science, Rainwater for Humanity has been collaborating with the Asparawa Screwpine Society, a local women’s self-help group, the households and the local users’ committee they have founded, and local masons and engineers, ensuring community participation in and ownership of the project. After evaluating the construction process and the performance of the tank, we plan on building a second prototype with a more experimental and cost-effective design in the village in 2010.

We have cultivated strong relationships with the village, and can thus effectively measure the health and social impacts of the design and refine our marketing and implementation strategies accordingly. If the Achinakom model is successful, we hope to expand to another village in Kuttanad in 2010.