WATER FOR EVERYONE.
The need for clean water is undeniable. Without water, communities are vulnerable to disease and poverty - of time, health, and economics. Water is the building block of life as we know it, and everyone deserves access to sufficient, safe water in their homes.
clean water is whAT STARTED IT ALL
This work is about far more than ensuring people have access to clean drinking water and do not die from readily preventable waterborne diseases: it is also about making sure children are healthy enough to go to school, women have the time to go to work as well as care for their families, and entire communities can begin devoting time and resources to other social, cultural and economic pursuits than fetching water. Ensuring that communities across the globe have ready access to clean drinking water is only becoming more critical by the day – and Solea Water is committed to that fight.
THE WATER CRISIS
Many estimate that water-related crises will shape some of the great geopolitical struggles of the 21st century. Yet far graver than whatever political conflicts are driven by water shortages is the humanitarian impact the water crisis already has on so many people. On the one hand, the UN estimates that 784 million people do not have access to clean drinking water. On the other, the WHO estimates that as many as 2.2 million people die annually from diarrhea alone, almost always the result of contaminated drinking water, the vast majority of them children.
ENGINEERING
Our team includes engineers with decades of experience to fit each water system to the individual needs of the community - considering the population size, climate, geography, politics and cultural context. Taking into consideration the context, practicality, and sustainability of the technology gives us a degree of climate proofing within the incredibly harsh environments of the arid landscape of Haiti and the unforgiving nature of the Panamanian rainforests. We seek to implement technology that has both low operational and management requirements to ensure we’re pumping water for years to come.
Our team of engineers helps design and construct each water system. Before that, professional quality plans are drawn up and provided to all local authorities and decision makers. These designs provide the community with a full understanding of the scope of the water system, and equip them with the knowledge to make future repairs or improvements.
Projects
In Haiti, we largely focus on maintenance. There are hundreds of public wells with broken hand pumps. Our local team fields calls from communities that are in need of hand pump repairs. Due to the relief/aid mindset of many other NGOs in Haiti, wells were drilled all over the country with no maintenance plan. Our team steps in that gap to restore water access for thousands in both urban and rural areas for a fraction of the cost of a new water system. In some semi-private settings (ex: schools, children’s homes) and rural communities, we have installed pumping, storage, and distribution systems for communities with more complex needs (ex: water filters, storage tanks, and solar pumps to reduce fuel dependence).
In Panama, we work with a team of professionals to design new water systems and retrofit existing systems that have either fallen into disrepair or never functioned to begin with. The communities we work with are largely along river systems, allowing us to build low cost gallery infiltration wells. The filtered river water is then pumped to a water tank at the highest point in the community and flows from there to individual taps at every home and building in the community. Other communities use gravity-fed systems from open streams or springs, with appropriate treatment designed for their context.