LifePump

More than 840 million people lack access to clean, safe drinking water. This reality means that many women and children around the world spend hours every day walking miles to collect water from streams and puddles that are usually contaminated. The unsafe water leads to disease and death, and the time spent collecting water means sacrificing other... opportunities such as going to school, farming, or starting a business. Providing safe and reliable water is a crucial first step in bringing health and economic opportunity to a community. It may sound simple, but there are challenges. In many communities, the water table is too deep for traditional hand pumps. Even if water is accessible, the pumps are often unreliable, sometimes needing repairs after only a few months of use. Studies show that many hand pumps break down every six months, with an average repair time of nearly a monthif they are repaired at all. Alarming statistics show that in many African countries, one-third of installed hand pumps are no longer working. Tragically, there are over 125,000 nonfunctioning wells across African countries, leaving approximately 31 million people with no access to clean water. Design Outreach (DO) began working on a completely new hand-powered water pump that was more reliable and could reach water in the deepest wells. The first pump was successfully installed in the village of Yamando, Central African Republic, in partnership with Water for Good. This prototype was able to pump to water from 400 feet deep! Previously, Yamandos well sat unused because there was no pump available that could get the water out. After testing in one village, DO immediately began working on a second-generation pump, incorporating the lessons learned from the first design. The team went back to the Central African Republic again with this new and improved version and saw much better results. DO continued tweaking the design, and today, DO is proud of the third-generation pump called the LifePump. LifePump has been designed to last longer ...Read More