Warka Water, by Architecture and Vision, is a new attempt to bring clean, affordable drinking water to impoverished areas of the world where people, even children, have to walk for hours each day to bring their families heavy canisters of water:
The World Aid organization is estimating that 2.3 billion people on the planet don’t have access to hygienic water. Women and children are walking for several kilometer every day to bring back in order to bring back to the village potable water. We have seen this situation with our eyes. Unfortunately, this is a reality. […] The name comes from a tree, the Warka tree, which is a very important element in Ethiopian culture, it is a huge tree that is unfortunately disappearing. Under the shadow of that tree much of the village life is happening. It is a place where people and children meet and are educated, where they make decisions about their lives, but also about the future of their community. The core idea of this project is to catch potable water from the sky during the night, but also to provide a meeting place for people.
One of these Warka water towers will cost about $1,000, but the structure is simple enough that after building a few the people may be able to make their own. This is an invention that could make water shortages a thing of the past and leaves us with our jaws floored. WOW!
And today we celebrate...