Affordable Technology
Simplicity is the key to developing new routines
The challenge
Water is life
Our founder, Roger Cabbage witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of waterborne illness in developing communities. Determined to find a solution, he searched for a water filter that was reliable, affordable, and truly designed for the realities of life in under-resourced communities. What he found instead was a gap — nothing that met all three criteria and cost less than 10% of a family’s annual income.
The need is massive.
There are a couple of ways to approach water treatment in developing nations — community scale, family scale, or at the individual level. There is a widespread awareness that the family scale is the most effective intervention level because we can change a family’s culture of behavior more easily than a community. Given the high risk of contamination during transport and storage, an in-home water filtration system is crucial to family health.
The solution
Innovation at a glance
In 2018, we set out to develop a water filter kit that was simple, effective, affordable, and built to last. Our unique system uses an oversized, washable hollow fiber membrane that can purify water from virtually any source. It’s easy to assemble, easy to use, and easy to clean. In fact, cleaning it is so simple we gave it a name: Dance to Clean™. Just swirl, dump, and you're done — no tools, no disassembly, no stress.
The solution is simple.
“In areas where people have few interactions with machinery or computers, I observed a general fear of breaking the filters when they had to backwash-clean them, which resulted in the filters getting clogged and no longer working. Filters ... have the filter threads exposed, which made cleaning as easy as swishing water around. The result ... was fewer errors found during our monitoring visits, more water filtered, and more healthy children proudly displaying their remarkable rural strength in daily soccer matches.”
Long-term Affordability
Costs 2.5¢ per family daily
We started with a simple, powerful question: What do you need to improve your life? And when families answered, we listened — then we took action, empowering communities with the tools to improve their health and their household economics. The key to sustainability is affordability. The value proposition is that clean water will cost less than the regular treatments for the waterborne diseases it prevents.
“In Uganda, it costs over two weeks income to take a taxi to the doctor, get a test, and get the treatment for typhoid for a single family member. For much less, they can prevent typhoid for their entire household for three years with these filters.”