Product/Service Development

HIVSmart!

In Cambodia, six in 10 women are anemic due to iron deficiency in their diets, causing premature labour, hemorrhaging during childbirth and the impaired brain development of their babies. Usually obtained through red meat or other iron-rich foods, a small chunk of iron added to water in the cooking pot can release a life-saving iron supplement. But attempts to persuade mothers to do so were unsuccessful.

The Indian construction industry is the second largest employer after agriculture and employs 30 million workers, of which two thirds are unskilled and over half live below the poverty line. 3 million children of migrant workers on construction sites are lacking services that provide access to adequate healthcare, nutrition, safe care, access to breastfeeding and basic stimulation and nurturing. These children end up on construction sites in India, invisible to businesses and governments.

Dropped into any shape and size of water bottle, CleanCube is designed to remove pathogens that cause illness and can lead to preventable death. The goal of this socially innovative product is to provide clean water in the Global South, while leveraging sales from the North American market in order to spur economic opportunity and save lives.

This idea integrates an expanded treatment of contaminated water using locally sourced Moringa seed, laboratory safety assessment of this treated water during pregnancy and the leaf powder from the same plant as a panacea for malnutrition in children.

This project aims to develop cost-effective point-of-use treatment technologies using abundant biomaterials for sequestering trace organics from various rivers in the Rift Valley region of Kenya. This technology is modular and complementary within established systems. If the project is successful, it will make access to clean and safe water an affordable reality.

In Bangladesh, 1 in 5 deaths (600,000 per year) occur due to groundwater arsenic, dubbed by WHO as the largest mass poisoning in history, with some 77 million people at risk. Toronto-based PurifAid will deploy new filtration units via franchised villagers who will filter and deliver purified water, perform maintenance, acquire new filters and dispose of old ones, which can be used to produce biofuels. We plan to roll out a new generation of filtration units which run on an organic by-product of the beverage industry.

This project provides a hydroelectric system for a village. Unlike conventional micro-hydro systems that regulate power with a dump load, excess power in this project goes into a water heater in each home to improve sanitation. Prototyping of the controller will be done in Calgary and the micro-hydro system in the village will be engineered by a Kathmandu group.

We are preparing an MSc program in Water Resources that will be offered to established universities in sub-Saharan Africa. Currently there is a lack of in-country programs that address the water crisis. The first programs will begin at two universities in September 2014 and it is planned to start 3 new programs per year after that until there are sufficient numbers to educate and train Africans to solve their own water problems.

The Banza Sanitation Pilot Project will conduct field trials of uniquely designed toilets and waste collection services in selected slum settlements of Kenya to test improvements in health and sanitation. The Banza Toilets are the design of Patrick Kiruki, an industrial designer from Kenya and the founder of Banza Ltd. A successful project will lead to scaled-up distribution of toilets and waste collection services in Kenya. Follow the Banza Sanitation Project on Twitter @BanzaToilet"