A brilliant South African invention, the PlayPump, turns the boredom of pumping or carrying water by hand into a fun activity.
In 1989 Ronnie Styver of Delmas in Mpumalanga adapted a children’s merry-go-round to pump water in rural areas.
The revolutionary pump design converts rotational movement into reciprocating linear movement using a driving mechanism that consists of only two working parts. This makes the pump highly effective, easy to operate and very economical.
PlayPumps are designed to solve one of the most pressing problems in semi-urban and rural areas of Africa – the provision of clean water. In many African countries women and girls walk 5km or more a day, often over rugged terrain, to collect water from rivers, dams and hand-pumped boreholes.
In the PlayPump, the spinning motion of the merry-go-round pumps underground water into a 2 500-litre header tank raised 7m above ground. The pump can raise up to 1 400 litres of water per hour from a depth of 40m, and is effective to a depth of 100m.
The storage tank has a four-sided advertising panel. Two sides are used to advertise commercial products to generate funds for the maintenance of the pump, and the other two sides are devoted to public health messages on personal hygiene and HIV and Aids prevention.
PlayPumps are made by Roundabout Outdoor, a for-profit organisation with a social mission co-founded by Trevor Field, and Playpumps International, a non-profit organisation that raises funds to donate PlayPumps to African communities and schools.
Field developed the idea for Roundabout Outdoor when he saw a prototype merry-go-round pump developed by Styver at an agricultural fair in Pretoria in 1989.
Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a paucity of clean water unequal to any other region in the world, and has the highest incidence of HIV and Aids victims. The PlayPump offers not only clean water, but potentially life-saving messages that can help to prevent the spread of the disease. The PlayPump won a World Bank Development Marketplace Award in 2000 for its effectiveness both at pumping water and communicating HIV/Aids messages on the water towers.
Apart from the health benefits to the community of clean, easily accessible drinking water, and the recreational opportunities provided to children, PlayPumps allow children to spend more time in school (instead of hauling water pumped by their parents), and enable women to spend more time at home or engaged in other activities that provide additional food or income for their families. The strain on women’s necks and backs of carrying 5kg buckets of water on their heads is also alleviated.
At a unit cost of about R100 000, PlayPumps are suitable for shared use by villages, particularly in areas where water is accessed from deep boreholes. There are now more than 1 000 PlayPumps operating in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly at schools and clinics, providing clean drinking water to more than a million people.
The charity WaterAid has criticised the PlayPump system’s “reliance on child labour”. The Guardian newspaper calculated that children would have to “play” for 27 hours every day to meet the PlayPumps’ target of providing the daily water needs of 2 500 people. In reality, the playing activities of children provide adequate water resources for their local communities.
In December 2009, the CEO of PlayPumps International announced that they had turned over their inventory to a new implementing NGO, “Water for People”, which would offer PlayPumps as an option for clean water provision to rural communities in Africa, starting in Malawi. - Cape Argus