2004 Health Award Laureate
Ashok J. Gadgil
| Laureate Country: United States |
| Website: www.waterhealth.com |
| Video: 2004Videos/ashok_gadgil.mov |
Project Overview: WaterHealth International (WHI) is a startup focusing on providing safe and affordable drinking water to communities in developing countries. WHI effort is to deliver the safe drinking water in a financially, technically, and organizationally sustainable manner. WHI has about 300 installations, in Mexico, the Philippines, and several other countries, providing safe drinking water daily to about 300,000 people. This year, 2004, WHI has expanded its presence in the Philippines, and is entering markets in India and Ghana.
Problem Addressed: About 1.2 billion people in the world still do not have access to safe drinking water. This leads to about 400 deaths of children (below age 5) hourly, and loss of billions of adult work hours annually, from diarrheal diseases. Standard methods of water disinfection are either too energy intensive and therefore unaffordable on a routine basis (boiling), or require sophisticated dosing, and transport and storage (chlorination). In some places this is compounded by ignorance about causes of diarrheal disease.
Technology Solution: UVWaterworks (UVW) disinfects drinking water at a rate of 15 liters a minute, adequate for a community of 2000. The cost of disinfecting water (including the amortized capital cost of UVW, pumps, storage tanks, replacement cost of filters, cost of electricity and a maintenance contract) is about US$1.50 per person per year. The high disinfection performance, rugged and robust design, and ease of maintenance of UVW allows affordable access to safe drinking water to hundreds of millions of underserved people.
