Lack of clean water is a huge problem in the world, accounting for over 80 percent of all sickness.
In a lot of cases women and kids walk to get water, but it takes hours of labor and impedes time spent in school, etc.
PlayPumps International installs PlayPump water systems in developing areas inaccessible to water. Kids play on a merry-go-round, which powers a pump that draws groundwater into a huge tank that sits on a seven meter tower.
And the tower has space for two health-related PSAs and two advertisements, which pay for all the maintenance.
Since I last checked they’ve added 700 PlayPumps in South Africa. They have plans to complete 4000 by 2010. An entire pump system only costs 14k USD and services up to 2500 people.
The world can always use more of the type of ingenuity that uses a typical activity to generate a solution to a major problem.
