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.

Kerala's tropical environment is lined with heavily polluted canals and rivers.

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 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.

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, was completed in December 2009 and supplies drinking and cooking water for nineteen households. As of August 2010, three individual family tanks were also completed in Achinakom.  One of the tanks was built with rebar reinforced ring construction, one with brick-and-mortar construction, and one was cast out of a mold. After evaluating the construction processes and the performances of the tanks, we plan on building new prototypes with more experimental and cost-effective designs. The key to our ongoing success is a sustainable economic model created by a partnership between the user groups and Rainwater for Humanity. We are beginning to implement a payback structure to ensure this sustainability. Users can choose between a traditional loan structure where they pay a monthly fee that is less than they would spend on vendor water during the month or a vending model where they buy water on a per liter bases at a rate that is less than the vendor price. These payback structures enable Rainwater for Humanity to provide cleaner and cheaper water for the families of Achinakom while ensuring an economically sustainable model that can impact as many families as possible in the region of Kuttanad.

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. 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 or 2011.