Over the past few decades, significant gains have been made in providing potable water to people across the globe. However, these gains have been geographically unequal, with significant lags occurring in rural areas of many developing nations. According to the 2019 joint report by WHO and UNICEF, 10% of the world’s population in 2017 still lacked basic drinking water (or about 785 million people). Approximately 10% of these people (&gt; 72 million) collected water directly from rivers, lakes, and ponds in Sub-Saharan Africa. Delivering drinking water inexpensively to rural areas is a “last mile” problem. Safe water delivery by pipe to remote areas from a central treatment facility requires large investments in infrastructure; however, potable water treatment by less expensive point-of-use technologies often results in improper operation and maintenance, and lack of documented water quality monitoring. A goal of our efforts has been the design an affordable decentralized surface water treatment and monitoring system that can be used in rural communities worldwide. The treatment system consists of slow sand filtration with disinfection, and a cellphone-based water quality monitoring system. The cellphone-based water quality monitoring system is essentially a handheld colorimeter (for chlorine) and light-scattering meter (for turbidity), or CT-meter. The CT meter connects wirelessly to a cellphone for the display and transmission of the data to a central hub. The data collected at the central hub can be used to assess the performance of a network of our water treatment units, and to ensure compliance of each unit with local drinking water standards. The system's impact can be determined quantitatively by (i) the measured improvements in water quality, (ii) the number of people served, and (iii) the volume of water provided. We have installed slow sand filters in several rural schools in Kenya, serving potable water to 200 to 400 students each. We have also developed the CT-meter and we will initiate CT-Meter data collection at these schools within the next year. For each school, the initial capital cost for the water treatment system is estimated to be less than $1,500 USD.

Decentralized water treatment and monitoring in rural Kenyan communities

ACS Fall 2021

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