Witnessing the problems of water scarcity in poor urban areas, Grégoire Landel decided to take action. He created a device that brings water to one billion urban dwellers who do not have access to running water at home.
To bring running water to every urban home, CityTaps has developed a solution that bridges the gap between water utilities and the urban poor: a prepayment service that comprises the world’s only smart and prepaid water meter, and a billing software. This solution helps utility companies reduce Non-Revenue Water and identify leaks to avoid water loss. It also helps utility companies reduce debts and improve their balance sheet so they can extend their network and serve more people with running water at home, mainly in poor urban areas.
Running water in the home is substantially cheaper, more convenient and healthier than any alternative. Grégoire Landel’s innovative solution has the potential to dramatically and quantifiably improve the lives and well-being of a billion people who do not have access to water at home. It is their goal to work together to make access to running water in every urban home a reality.
One billion urban dwellers do not have access to clean running water at home. The lack of access to running and clean water can cause health problems for people living in poor urban areas. Indeed, many of them may not be able to pay monthly bills and the high upfront connection costs needed to get access to running water, due to their irregular incomes.
Substitutes such as public water points, delivery services and chlorine pills, can be up to 15 times more expensive than utility piped water and are often of low quality and unreliable. Women and girls are most affected, spending over 200 million hours fetching water every day. Global urbanisation tends to exacerbate the strain on water utility infrastructure with African cities alone growing 5% every year. Water utilities cannot serve everyone due to a lack of money to invest in infrastructure in order to reach the poorest people living in cities.
Over 1500 homes connected, improving the health and finances of thousands of people. Women do not have to spend most of their day travelling to get water, which is often not clean. Lost water is identified in real time. Utilities are prepaid for their water, helping them reduce debts and spend money on extending their network for more people. Low income families can prepay for water as and when they like with mobile money and do not receive huge bills and incur huge debts.
The people this scheme will impact live in the poor urban areas of countries such as Niger, Kenya, Senegal…. For example, through a pilot project in Niger from 2016 to 2019,1,325 water connections were equipped with CityTaps solutions, directly having a positive impact on 13,250 people (households are of 5 people in average). More than two thirds of impacted people earn less than 10 US dollars a day and one third of them are under the age of 13 years old. By 2022, the initiative wants to impact 2 million people in poor urban areas.
Each utility company and environment is unique so they have to adapt to each organization. They are a small and agile team, so they partner with the utilities and work closely together.
In the next few years, CityTaps would like to scale to other countries and find other utilities who need help to bring running water to urban homes all over the world !
In order to save biodiversity, Djibone Sissoko mobilises young people to stop bushfires from spreading in Mali and educates inhabitants from his commune Kita-Ouest about the dangers these fires pose for animals and for the environment. He acts to raise awareness among small farmers and their families about the harmful effects that bushfires can have if poorly managed, devastating fauna and flora in their path.
Friends Sam Teicher and Gator Halpern have co-founded Coral Vita, a high-tech coral farming solution to protect the dying reefs in The Bahamas and around the world. Through high-impact coral reefs restoration, Coral Vita helps preserve reefs for future generations while spurring the blue economy’s growth locally and globally.
Coral Vita’s land-based farms integrate breakthrough methods to accelerate coral growth up to 50x (micro fragmenting) while enhancing their resiliency to warming and acidifying oceans (assisted evolution). Coral Vita’s model scales: one land-based farm can potentially supply an entire nation’s reefs with sufficient capital investment.
Alongside this novel form of high-tech coral farming, Coral Vita is deploying an innovative for-profit model to sustain large-scale restoration. Given reefs’ tremendous value, they are working to transition restoration to a commercial industry. This unique model facilitates revenue generation and better scalability than any current restoration practitioners. Coral Vita sells reef restoration as a service to customers that depend on reefs’ benefits. As the farms grow diverse, resilient, and affordable coral for restoration projects, they also function as eco-tourism attractions and education centres. Guests pay to visit the farms, where they learn about the importance of protecting reefs, and how they can help, including by adopting coral or planting them with Coral Vita’s teams and local dive shops. Students, fishermen, and community members also visit the farm to build local capacity for future jobs in the blue economy, and Coral Vita emphasizes hiring locally as much as possible.
Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua is acting to tackle a fundamental problem: water scarcity in wildlife zones!
The project is all about water for wildlife as one way of conservation and reducing human-wildlife conflict for competing for the same water resource. Indeed, as the number of conflicts between humans and wild animals started to rise due to water scarcity, Patrick decided to bring in an efficient solution through re-watering the dry wildlife zones. Moreover, Patrick is also looking for innovative methodologies to make sure that animals have plenty of water into the wildlife zones.
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