Computers are meant to make our lives easier. As Thomas Bjelkeman reminded me recently, “Mark, the aim is to get the computers to do the work, so you don’t have to.”

Akvo makes it easy to structure large numbers of development projects online in a visual, friendly manner, that until now would have cost the partnership, marketing and web teams at a typical NGO a lot of time and money to design, build, populate and maintain with information. Using Akvo, every project can be listed in one place, and specific or sample projects, or sublistings, can be featured in many others.

Witness the launch, today, of the Walking for Water landing page. Walking for Water is a great campaign where school kids learn about the issues facing many of the world’s poorest people, who lack access to clean water – here’s the background. Next month, tens of thousands of kids will walk 6 km with 6 litres of water on their backs, raising money from friends and family, to fund real-life water projects in the developing world. Now in its 9th year, it’s a huge success story. Last year’s campaign, in the Netherlands alone, saw 18,000 kids from 380 schools raise €1m for water projects, at fairly low organising costs.

Putting all projects online, in one place

Akvo has made it possible for the campaign to feature, for the first time, all the projects that Walking for Water will support, online, in a really flexible way. All of the projects get entered once, in Akvo.org, using the simplified partner admin pages we’ve built.

Here are some stats (as of today, Friday 12 March 2010):

22 projects.

12 countries, all in developing nations, all in rural or slum areas.

Project sizes vary between €2,400 and €397,287.

33 project partners involved.

€970k total project value (and rising)

This is the second introduction of a campaign-specific landing page – the first, in October, was Live Earth. Akvo landing pages are one of the ways we’re evolving our system to fit really comfortably with a campaign partner’s existing branding, while they gain the benefits of our carefully designed online tools.

It adds a top level, super-smart way to front a multi-project campaign. Normally projects are also then featured online elsewhere on the organisation’s website – so right now there’s a listing on the main Walking for Water website, and it’s easy to embed banner ad-style “widgets” on other sites, such as here and here. These latter examples are important – we’re creating ways for individuals and small foundations to feature projects online really easily.

It could go further. Schools (or indeed the kids themselves) can even ‘embed’ widgets on their own blogs, if they have one, by choosing a project and then clicking “get a widget”. As updates to the projects happen, either in the field or from the fundraising side, all instances of the project online also get updated automatically.

See it happen – every project, in every location

By using the Akvo.org system, Aqua for All is helping the kids see the actual project they’re funding – not just a few samples. 2010’s ten-year olds have completely different expectations of development projects and expect far more in terms of images, maps and status updates than kids did even five years ago. This is about instigating direct connections to real places and real people.

It’s going to be really interesting to see what kind of dynamic is triggered between schoolkids and the projects. We’ll be able to follow that progress over the coming months, right here.

Making it easier to get every project online, looking good, in a format that can be easily updated and expanded is a central goal for us. Featuring all projects online, every one of which is enabled to share and serve photo and text updates directly from the field, is something that’s only now becoming possible, practical and affordable for NGOs and campaigners. It’s great to have been involved in making this happen for Walking for Water.

Mark Charmer is a co-founder of Akvo. He’s based in London.

Related reading: Nicholas Kristof’s Advice for Saving the World (interesting piece on the power of direct person-to-person storytelling).

His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange is heir apparent to the throne of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, chairman of the United Nations Secretary General Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation and member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). (picture Paul Blank).

HRH the Prince of Orange will participate in the Run for Water on Sunday 18th April in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This event will take place in and around the Olympic Stadium, built for the 1928 summer Olympics. After the 6 km run, a concert for 20,000 people will feature various local artists. See the line-up here. The goal of the event is to raise awareness for the global drinking water crisis.

Globally, over a billion people lack safe drinking water. On average, children and women in developing countries walk 6 km every day to fetch water. The US-based organisation Live Earth, founded by Al Gore and Kevin Wall, has launched a global campaign to initiate a movement that can help solve this crisis.

On the 18th April, 6 km runs are expected to take place in over a hundred locations, with concerts in cities like Melbourne, Hong Kong, Cape Town, London, Berlin, Sao Paolo, New York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam.

HRH the Prince of Orange is chairman of the United Nations Secretary General Advisory Board (UNSGAB), tasked with providing advice about practical measures to help reach the Millennium Development Goals for water and sanitation.

See the official Dutch press statement here.

Peter van der Linde is the partner – director of Akvo.

A lot of internet projects have a habit of showing forward projections with steep growth curves. Graphs that are conveniently forgotten when they fail to become reality.

Graph above: Funds committed and needed for projects on Akvo.org, 2010-03-03.

So it’s really nice to be able to show you Akvo’s current historical growth curve, based on the value of projects being entered into the system by our various partners, right up to today.

As of now we have 171 project partners involved in 130 projects worth nearly Euro 3.75 million in the system (US$5.14 million). The partners break down as:

- 113 Field partners (drilling wells, building toilet infrastructure, running training, etc)

- 30 Support partners (who supervise and coordinate projects, usually helping to specify them and being responsible for ensuring proper monitoring is carried out)

- 89 Funding partners (who fund projects, are campaigning to secure funds for them, or who mobilise funds from local communities or governments)

You can learn more about different types of Akvo partners here.

A number of things have contributed to this boom in project numbers.

First was the introduction of our partner admin interface and help documentation last summer, which has made it much easier for support partners (who are the key group who commit projects) to rightsize their projects and upload them with only minimal assistance from our Hague team.

The other factor has been the launch of several big water fundraising campaigns, meaning our partners are able to confidently add plenty of new projects, in the knowledge they’re likely to get funded. First, the decision by the Dow Live Earth Run for Water to use Akvo to structure and feature all the projects it will support in 2010 provided a massive boost. As you can see from the chart, after the launch of Live Earth in October, the value of projects in Akvo more than doubled by January, to around Euro 2.8 million ($3.8 million). A fresh boost has come from our partnership with Aqua for All and Walking for Water, a schools education and fundraising campaign. Akvo has enabled Walking for Water to easily take each project it supports online – a reason there was a further uptick in projects added in February. With the support of Live Earth we’re now opening up and internationalising Walking for Water, so expect even more Walking for Water projects to come onstream in the months ahead.

Now for a bit of realism. 18 projects are complete and 19 projects are active today. A full 92 need funding – yet the great news is that with both Live Earth and Walking for Water happening in the next two months, we should see significant funds flowing into these projects, meaning they can get underway. For a flavour of what’s coming, check out what’s happening at Live Earth Amsterdam. And that’s just one event – there are likely to be more than 100 Live Earth events around the world.

This is just the beginning. Thanks to everyone who’s helped us get this far.

Mark Charmer is a co-founder of Akvo.

At Akvo, we are always looking for ways to assist our partners in realizing water and sanitation projects around the globe. Last year we approached the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) to see if any of their students would be interested in exploring concepts that could help increase the water awareness of the general public. Five students immediately formed the Design for Water group.

Photo above: The Design for Water team of the Utrecht School of Arts

One of the concepts they came up with relates to the Dow Live Earth Run for Water, and is called ‘Water Runs the City’.

Catherina van der Meer, one of the Design for Water students: “We realized that the runners could form a water stream, running through the city – passing huge pictographs of pipes, taps, toilets, and umbrellas. It could help bring the run and the message it aims to conveys to life.”

Have a look at the nice movie they did, which gives a good impression. Wouldn’t it be great to see this in action one day!

Design for Water is a joint project between the HKU and Akvo. The concept is owned by HKU, and can be used for non-profit activities connected to the Dow Live Earth Run for Water. To contact the Design for Water team, please send a mail to Catharina van der Meer (designforwater [at] gmail.com) or to Mark Tiele Westra (m.t.westra [at] akvo.org).

Links:

• Movie introducing the Water Runs the City concept, with short interviews of makers
• Movie introducing the Water Runs the City concept
• The website of Utrecht School of Arts
• The Akvo website

Around the world, most boreholes are drilled with big, heavy equipment which arrives by truck, makes a lot of noise, and gets the job done in a short time, at a cost of about $5,000 to $20,000 per borehole. But there is a growing interest in doing it in a different way — drilling by hand. It takes longer, it is heavy work, but it also gets the job done. Why are people getting interested? A hand-drilled borehole costs about $500 or less.

Photo above: Wolfgang Buchner (right) operating the drill stem. On the left, Juan Chambilla holding the rope, pulling the drill stem up and down.

This large difference in cost is leading more and more organisations to consider manual drilling as a viable option. An example is UNICEF, which is now running a large scale manual drilling effort in Chad, and will be starting manual drilling in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well.

Of course, manual drilling does not work everywhere. Clay, sand, and compacted sand are ok, but rock or large stones are not ok. But it just happens to be the case that hundreds of millions of people live in areas which have just the right soil types. One such country with the right soil type is Bolivia. It is home to two different manual drilling technologies, the EMAS method and the Baptist method (which I discussed here).

The Master Driller — Wolfgang Buchner
On the shore of the Titicaca lake, about an hour’s drive from the capital of Bolivia, La Paz, lies Puerto Pérez, a small village. At this far-flung place, German engineer Wolfgang Eloy Buchner has created a unique Technology Demonstration Centre called EMAS, a Spanish acronym for Mobile School for Water and Sanitation. The ‘mobile’ refers mostly to Wolfgang himself, who is extremely energetic and trains people all over the world.

The EMAS concept that he has developed consists of a complete set of low-cost water and sanitation technologies, such as manual well drilling, water pumps, windmills, irrigation, solar water heating, latrines, and ferrocement tanks. Movies describing all the technologies are available in this EMAS Vimeo channel.

Movie showing the standard EMAS well drilling method.

The EMAS method
In the course of 25 years, Wolfgang has perfected a manual drilling method which can be adapted to a range of conditions, and has trained some 400 local people in the art of well drilling. To get an impression of the drilling technique have a look at the movie. The EMAS method is mainly used in Bolivia, Panama, Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Eritrea and Sri Lanka.

A complete drilling rig, suitable for boreholes up to 40 metres deep, can be built in Bolivia for about $800. This includes the tower, mud pump and all essential tools to operate and maintain it. The low price means that it is very cheap for someone to start up his or her own small drilling enterprise, and this is exactly what has happened on a large scale in Bolivia, where borehole drilling services are now widely available from the local private sector.

The price for a borehole including pump is $6 per metre, which means $120 for a 20m deep well, cheap enough for many families to afford. Although such a well will not penetrate rock, it is certainly a rock-bottom price.

Author: Mark Tiele Westra, Editor Akvopedia.

Links:

• Other blogs in this series
• For more low-cost water and sanitation solutions, visit Akvopedia, part of akvo.org
• Akvopedia article on EMAS well drilling
• EMAS well drilling method
• Materials needed for EMAS well drilling
• Alternative methods: EMAS well drilling by suction , and EMAS well drilling by sludging
• Information on UNICEF website on manual drilling (see technical note series)

Jeroen van der Sommen is director of the Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP), one of the founding partners of Akvo. Last week he attended the inaugural Aquatech trade fair in New Delhi, India.

The Tulip Filter is based on a Dutch invention, and is produced locally in Pondicerry, India.

Ten years ago, the Netherlands Water Partnership was founded on the belief that solving the water problems in the world required joint action of government, private sector, knowledge centres and NGOs. Today, 200 organisations work together in NWP, forming a one-stop shop for the Dutch Water Sector.

At NWP, we are convinced that whatever the problem, it should be solved through an integrated approach, combining technology, capacity building and governance. That is why we brought a delegation of our member organisations to Aquatech who together span this whole range – across the whole water ‘cycle’.

The company Fugro brought airborne water surveys, Eijkelkamp brought its onsite survey tools, Microlan demonstrated water sensors and monitoring equipment, Paques and IMT showed off water treatment technologies, Applus brought asset management and leakage detection to the mix, GENAP demonstrated water storage options, and DHV brought it all together with system integration.

Jeroen van der Sommen interviews Klaas van der Ven on the Tulip Filter.

India faces many water issues with its fast growing population. More and more, consumers will demand better drinking water, better service and better quality, and there is a huge need for water in agriculture. It’s very clear that solving the Indian water challenges is not only a matter of high-tech solutions for the high-end market, but also of appropriate and affordable solutions for the huge rural market.

A stand that attracted lots of visitors was that of Basic Water Needs India, which produces a very effective family water filter for less than 500 Rupees ($11). The filter, sold in India under the brand name Tulip Filter, is based on a Dutch invention, and is produced locally in Pondicerry, India.

Jeroen van der Sommen is chairman of Akvo and the managing director of Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP)

Last Friday I spent the afternoon talking to Henk Witteveen and Dimitri Schouten at Upstream Advertising about the plans for Live Earth Amsterdam, this year’s cultural festival De Parade, 3D holograms and other fun stuff. Henk and Dimitri have over ten years experience in organizing major events like the Dance Parade in Rotterdam that attracted over 400,000 people last year. Last summer they agreed to take up the challenge to make the Dutch Live Earth event a success.

Above: This short trailer for Live Earth Amsterdam has been developed by Jorn, intern at Upstream Advertising.

The venue they have chosen is the Olympic Stadium, built for the 1928 Summer Olympics. With the support of run2day and others, they expect to attract over 20,000 runners. The 6k run through the centre of Amsterdam will bring the participants back to the stadium for a concert that will feature local artists like Rigby and Valerious. We have teamed up with Hank from het goede doel sms to be able to tie SMS donations during this campaign directly to featured Akvo projects, which will in turn be linked to local celeberties.

It is great that the local government of Amsterdam has provided the logistical support to help make this event possible. Veronica and Radio 538 have agreed to be the national media partners to help build momentum and exposure.

In consultation with Live Earth a local website has been developed where you can register to run and buy concert tickets for this event.

The Dow Live Earth Run for Water aims to be the world’s largest-ever initiative focused on raising awareness and funds to tackle the global water crisis. All the projects that are being funded from money raised globally can feature web and SMS reporting via the Akvo system.

We will be sharing more news about the plans for Live Earth Amsterdam over the coming weeks. It’s great to see how far we have come since the launch in New York, last October.

Peter van der Linde is the partner director at Akvo.

At Akvo, we have a host of fantastic projects all deserving of your money, but what’s the most effective way to actually donate? In an ideal world, every cent of a donation would go directly to the project, but in the real world, this is surprisingly hard to achieve. For instance, PayPal – the most used payment gateway – currently charges 3.9% plus 35 cents of each transaction.

In the Netherlands, the banks have put together a rather neat new payment system, called iDeal. The idea behind it is that people can handle online payments using their own bank’s system, and therefore without leaving the payment environment they are used to. The best part is that the fee is only 99 cents per transaction, regardless of the amount.

One of our star programmers, Paul Burt, has done some heavy Django lifting to integrate iDeal into the Akvo system. To do this, he used Mollie, a smart company who have absorbed the complexity necessitated by the banks and come up with a simple programming interface (API) to deal with iDeal payments. True to his (and our) nature, Paul has created an open source library in Django, which from now on will make it much easier for others to integrate iDeal into their websites. Paul explains his efforts in the video.

So, people of the Netherlands, start funding those fantastic projects!

Mark Westra the is editor of Akvopedia.

A rope pump mounted on a well in Zambia. Using the rope pump allows the well to be covered, which vastly improves the water quality. Photo Henk Holtslag

In the water sector, as elsewhere, good ideas can be surprisingly old. One such old idea is the rope pump, which is over 2000 years old and was used in ancient China. A rope pump consists of a pipe that reaches down to the water, a rope or chain through the tube, washers attached to the rope that fit snugly inside the tube, and a wheel on top to draw the rope with washers through the pipe. The water is held between the washers in the pipe, and is pulled to the surface.

In its many ancient incarnations, the rope pump has been named the ball-and-chain pump, Chinese liberation pump, Noria pump, paternoster pump, chain pump, and many others. Its original design used tubes made of wood (hollowed-out tree trunks, for example), and big balls of leather or wooden plates. These earlier variations of the rope pump were used extensively for irrigation in agriculture and in the large and leaky wooden-canvas-hemp ships of the day, to pump out any unwanted water and prevent sinking.

Modern times
In the 70s, R. Van Tijen of the Dutch Demotech organisation reintroduced the pump, and started using modern materials such as PVC pipes and rubber car tires. It was introduced in Africa as “rope and washer pump” as a low lift pump for irrigation and family wells in the 70s. It never really took off, probably for reasons as its low lift capacity, its “Stone Age” image, and the lack of involvement of the local private sector.

Success in Nicaragua
This completely changed in Nicaragua, where the rope pump was introduced in 1986. The Dutch organisation SNV worked on technical improvements and first dissemination, after which the local company Bombas de mecate SA made it a commercial success through sales to the private sector, and later on to NGOs and government. Now the rope pump provides over 35% of the rural water supply in Nicaragua and is produced by some 20 local workshops. A host of models has been produced, including rope pumps powered by bicycle, windmills, animal traction, and small engines.

Left: a rope pump used by a single household in Nicaragua. Right: a rope pump mounted on a borehole in Mozambique, supplying water for 30 families. Photos Henk Holtslag.

Nowadays, an estimated 100.000 rope pumps are used by 4 million people, of which around 70.000 in Nicaragua, 15.000 in neighbouring countries, 2.500 in Cambodia and India, and 15.000 in various countries in Africa. Particularly successful is the “Elephant pump”, which consists of a rope pump surrounded by a concrete structure. The Live Earth partner Pump Aid has placed 5.000 Elephant pumps in Zimbabwe and Malawi, with about 80 added each month. NGOs such as Water Aid, Care and Unicef are using rope pumps in their programmes.

A recent innovation: the rope pump used for rice paddy irrigation in Vietnam. Photo Graham Gripps, SNV Vietnam.

Suitable conditions and limitations
There are different opinions on the question if rope pumps are fit for communal water supply, as the pump is semi-open, of lightweight construction, and requires frequent maintenance. On the one hand, in many countries the rope pump is used for communal water supply, and in Nicaragua the rope pump is the national standard for hand pumps used by organisations such as UNICEF, CARE, etc. There, the recommended maximum number of families for one rope pump is about 20. On the other hand, in many countries governments are reluctant to use the rope pump because of perceived problems.

To help the successful introduction of the rope pump in a new area or country it is strongly advised to start with promoting the rope pump as a family pump or as a pump for irrigation used by larger groups of farmers. If it works well, usage can be expanded to communal pumps, in cooperation with local or national governments. In all cases it is strongly recommended to use updated manuals combined with training by professional organisations. After all, simple is not easy.

Mark Westra is editor of Akvopedia.

Links:

• Other blogs in this series
• Akvopedia article on Rope pumps
• Frequently Asked Questions on Rope pumps
• Rope pump information by Practica Foundation. Practica has made a professional manual detailing the construction of rope pumps.
• Ropepumps.org website
• Information on Rope pumps on the Rural Water Supply Network
• YouTube movies on (1) Rope pumps around the world, (2) small scale irrigation using a rope pump in Zambia, (3) making a hand-drilled borehole and ropepump in Tanzania

If you’re in the UK and able to use BBC iPlayer, I’d encourage you to watch the first episode of “The Virtual Revolution”, Dr Aleks Krotoski’s exploration into how the world wide web “is reshaping every aspect of our lives”.

I began working in information technology in 1992, in ICL, a kind of British version of IBM that didn’t really survive the death of the mainframe. It was full of people trying to preserve the way IT had been sold and delivered in the 1980s. Big expensive deals with big companies and governments, involving armies of advisors and complicated computers and networks, for people who had fond memories of the typing pool. Most people I met sat around discussing company car scales, and plans for golf. I used to sit at my desk in Old Windsor, a Windows 286 PC whirring away, waiting for 5pm, when the afternoon Concorde flight from New York would roar past my window, on finals into Heathrow. No doubt carrying Joan Collins, or Phil Collins. Somebody else’s world, that I could only watch.

I then worked at Apple, in Poland, right after the fall of the iron curtain. From our (Cupertino-style) vantage point above a hat factory in the Warsaw suburbs, Eastern Europe was an exciting but impenetrable market. Poland didn’t need Apple’s technology of the early ’90s – it needed cheap PCs and lots of them. Remember, the world wide web was only just being invented. It was a turbulent time for Apple, too. Globally it was losing market share and grappling with expensive products that were underpowered, too early for mainstream adoption, or that it didn’t know how to bring to market. In 1993, we’d be playing with Quicktime in the office on a Quadra 660AV – videos on a computer – little postage stamp videos. And we’d be going “Wow!”. But the Polish buyers couldn’t use those features – they were just fun stuff. Then there was the Apple QuickTake digital camera. For about $400 it would hold 16 digital photographs. “Why do I need digital photographs, when the cameras are expensive and I can’t do anything useful with the photos?” people rightly asked. Warsaw at the time was filling rapidly with Kodak and Fuji logos, as film camera sales boomed. It wasn’t the right time.

Like most companies, these firms were grappling with the future – each unsure how things would evolve. ICL eventually disappeared, its lucrative government contracts being absorbed into Fujitsu. Apple spent another five years in the doldrums, while Microsoft, Compaq and others brought personal computing to the masses. Until it got Steve Jobs back and launched the iMac.

It’s easy for outsiders to believe everyone who works in information technology actually understands the changes going on in the world, and builds computers, software and businesses that are in tune with them. They’d be wrong. There are many that don’t – the world is full of rubbish technology, or good technology, that’s badly timed. Stuff designed in a bubble, that doesn’t have a purpose, that doesn’t change how you do things with other people.

But something extraordinary has happened in information technology over the past five years, something that I still struggle to put my finger on. Krotoski’s programme is in tune with our time and gets under the skin of this change – gets more closely to the heart of what’s changing right now – than most other TV programmes about computing.

The heart of this change in computing is essentially political. Computing is now much more open than it was and knowledge flows around much better than before. Software is often free, people can publish freely, they can change things and republish improved versions. Mistakes are no longer disasters – you can change things. The devices are now much better, too and they’re not just great for people who type – they’re for people who see images, who can express ideas simply, rather than in great tomes. They work in more places, too, and simply allow you to do more things. And they’re much cheaper.

It’s making the people who used to control things – who hoarded information, or resource, who held a lid on people’s talents – well, it’s showing those people up as out of touch, as no better, and often worse, than those with the guts and imagination to go out and make things happen. The people who share, who adapt, who listen – the people committed to develop their understanding of problems, and committed to helping others do the same.

The rash of analysis and “Meh” commentary from people last week after the launch of Apple’s splendid new iPad seems so banal in comparison to the fact that fifteen years ago, almost nobody instinctively felt the power of IT to change how we live.

Today almost all of you feel it a little bit. From my friends this morning in Dhaka in India, Cork in Ireland, in The Hague and in New York, watching my “Twitpics” – yes digital photos that bounce around the world instantaneously via Twitter. People who feel part of my day, as I do theirs. It’s about how people I know in America can follow and build upon the work of people I know in London, in completely new ways, whenever I pick up my phone or a cheap video camera. It’s felt by people who guiltily use Facebook at the office – who understand that all these tiny insights into people, these tiny opportunities to interact, are much more powerful than typing long group emails, that noone reads. Or writing reports that only one person will ever receive, and probably won’t read. They *know* something’s changing. They just can’t quite put their finger on it.

The thing that now holds us back is not the technology. It’s our ability to break out of long-established assumptions about how to work, and how quickly you can make good things happen. It’s about whether those we work for – those we work with – have the wisdom and courage to give others permission to do what is now possible. It’s the greatest of times.

Mark Charmer is a co-founder of Akvo. He’s talking at this Thursday’s Media140 conference, part of Social Media Week, in London.