Safe Water

Over 700 million people live without access to safe water. This damages their quality of life because of waterborne diseases, such as diarrhea and cholera, and diminishes the productivity of the most vulnerable. In Venezuela, 80% of the population (over 22 million people) are exposed to these situations.

Safe Water proposes a community model that diagnoses the characteristics of vulnerable communities, deliver pieces of training and installs a water purification unit that will be operated by a social service organization as a social franchise, supplying free safe water to vulnerable people and selling bottled water to afford the maintenance of the unit, and to sustain its activities.

Our solution improves health and well-being, promotes productivity and strengthen social service organizations, therefore it has a large scope and is able to solve problems of marginalized groups, refugees, victims of natural disasters, etc. with a long-term, self-sustainable approach.

Across the globe, specially in developing countries, access to safe water is still a challenge. People living in the poverty belts of big cities are deprived of safe drinking water. According to the WHO and UNICEF, over 740 million people live without access to safe water. This situation has two main consequences:

1. Life-threatening diseases: Around 10,000 people die every day from water and sanitation related diseases and illnesses, being diarrhea the first cause of death of children under 5.
2. Reduced productivity: According to the UNDP, over 40 billion productive hours are lost each year to fetching water in sub-Saharan Africa, and over 440 million school days are lost worldwide from water-related illnesses.

In Venezuela, over 80% of the population lacks access to safe water, therefore they are exposed to these consequences. It means that 22.8 million people are under life threat and tied to a poverty vicious cycle. Many of them are also under undernourishment risk because of the Complex Humanitarian Emergency the country is going through.

Our Solution is a social water-purification franchise. We comply with the statement of the WHO of guaranteeing "safe drinking water from a source less than 0.62 miles away and at least 5.82 gallons per person per day".

We do so through a tailored safe water source for vulnerable communities that creates jobs and generates income for social service organizations.

Our model comprises five main activities:

1. Community diagnosis: Performed by in-house surveys, health assessments, and water laboratory analyses.
2. Community pieces of training: Focused on awareness, and prevention and hygiene practices.
3. Purification unit installation and start-up: The unit is comprised by six stages of filtration and one of disinfection, guaranteeing the compliance of the water with the sanitary regulations.
4. Purification unit sustainable management and operation: The unit is managed through an in-the-cloud system that monitors maintenance and profitability. The unit supplies safe drinking water for free to vulnerable people, and sells bottled water to third parties to be cover the unit costs, sustain social service organizations' activities, and the expansion of the model.
5. Impact assessment: Measuring the same indicators of the community diagnosis, to compare them.

Each plant can serve over 1,500 people daily for ten years.

The target population of our innovation are, mainly:

• Children up to 12.
• People with disabilities.
• Elders.
• Lactating and pregnant women.

We address them through social service organizations that serve the most vulnerable among those groups, specially those under risk of malnutrition.

Nowadays they are deprived of safe drinking water, having to look for it far from their houses, sometimes from unprotected sources that does not guarantee its quality.

To understand their needs and reality, our community model includes a community diagnosis that allows us to design a tailored solution, based on their actual needs and ways of life.

Not only are they benefited by having a safe drinking water source near their houses, but also because of the creation of jobs to operate the water purification unit, the improvement of their productivity (both from new income and from saved time and money previously used to fetch water), and the strengthening of social service organizations that serve their communities.

Water quality is at the backbone of human development. The challenge considers it within the dimension of "Aggregate local projects to enable access to financial capital for ecosystem services such as natural hazard mitigation, water quality, and carbon storage".

Our innovation relies on alliances in order to bring about change. Our model requires social service organizations to deliver the final product (safe drinking water) but also needs investments to afford the technology and activities of our model. Therefore, it is a joint initiative that brings together efforts from different sectors to provide quality water to the most vulnerable.

Currently, our model is operating in five communities located in four different states of Venezuela. Everyday, over 7,500 people have access to safe drinking water through our water purification units, and we have been able to measure a decrease of 20% in waterborne diseases cases, as well as the saving of 800 productive hours per month per community.

Our water purification units comply with the sanitary regulations, and are able to generate enough income to sustain its own maintenance, support the activities of social service organizations, and contribute to the growth of our model.

Therefore, we are in the growth stage. We are looking for new communities to install our model, and for funds to cover its costs. After we reach 14 water purification units operating, we will be able to cover all the costs of the installation of new units, therefore being able to scale-up exponentially.

Bringing together cutting-edge technologies, community engagement and a social franchise model is our innovation.

Water access is a serious challenge in a lot of countries, but until now little innovations have been made in a community approach. New technologies are being developed for household water purification, or solutions are being installed in vulnerable settlements without any sustainability guarantee other than the continuity of the assistance (and the investment).

Safe Water brings water purification technologies close to those most in need, and empower them with skills, practices and processes to make it a long-lasting solution that not only will solve the quality water scarcity problem, but also will energize the economic situation of vulnerable families and of the social service organizations that serve them.

Our water purification plants are operated by social service organizations (franchisees), hiring people from the community (therefore creating jobs), and they will supply free safe drinking water to vulnerable people while selling bottled water to non-vulnerable groups. These sales will sustain the water purification unit operation and maintenance, and also will generate income to support the social service activities of the franchisee (food, education and health, mainly).

Our model guarantees that the equipment will have a long lifetime, and will have further positive impact on other areas of life, and it also makes the model to be able to grow exponentially. 

People currently benefiting from our Safe Water model:

• Children up to age 12, lactating and pregnant women, elders and people with disabilities: 1,200 daily
• Low-income non-vulnerable people having access to an upgraded safe drinking water source: 660 daily
• TOTAL: 1,860 people daily.

Our model is currently operating in four communities.

People that will be benefited from our model in one year:

• Children up to age 12, lactating and pregnant women, elders and people with disabilities: 3,300 daily
• Low-income non-vulnerable people having access to an upgraded safe drinking water source: 1,815 daily
• TOTAL: 5,115 people daily.

We are currently working in an additional community that soon will have access to safe drinking water, and before October we have planned to assist two more communities. From November 2021 to June 2022, we estimate to be able to deploy the model in four additional communities, summing up a total of 11 communities.

People that will be benefited from our model in five years:

• Children up to age 12, lactating and pregnant women, elders and people with disabilities: 18,000 daily

• Low-income non-vulnerable people having access to an upgraded safe drinking water source: 9,900 daily
• TOTAL: 27,900 people daily.

Considering a consistent growth through the years, we estimate that we could install the following number of units:

• 2021-2022: 7 units/communities
• 2022-2023: 9 units/communities
• 2023-2024: 10 units/communities
• 2024-2025: 15 units/communities
• 2025-2026: 15 units/communities

Thus, reaching a served population of 27,900 people within five years.

Our Key Performance Indicators are:

• Institutional settings with an upgraded drinking water source as a result of the implementation of the solution.
• People previously deprived from safe drinking water that now have access to it.  
• Attendance to pieces of training on hygiene and prevention practices, and reach of the campaigns.  
• Attendance to pieces of training on water purification units’ operation, maintenance and sustainable management.  
• People assessed by physicians regarding waterborne diseases.
• Variation in waterborne diseases cases before and after the consumption of water from the purification unit.  
• Households surveyed about behaviors related to water.
• Hours and time saved by families that were previously used to fetch drinking water.

Full-time staff:

Five people. Three men and two women. A chemical engineer, a civil engineer, a political scientist, and students of civil and environmental engineers.

Part-time staff:

Four people. Three women and one man. Two social communicators and two statistics students.

Volunteers:

Over 100 registered volunteers. 60% women, 40% men.

Our team is comprised by young people involved in social causes for several years. We met each other at the student movement and in volunteering, and developed a shared sense of purpose: to put our knowledge and skills to serve those most in need.

With work experience in water treatment, project management, and community outreach, we have the key competences to perform successfully and efficiently this solution.

All of us are part of the 80% of the Venezuelan population that lacks access to safe drinking water, so we ourselves also suffer the consequences of the problem we are trying to solve, therefore we are easily empathic with our beneficiaries.

Regarding education, in addition to the bachelor degrees (in engineering and political science), our team also holds masters in public management and in environmental innovation.

Diversity and inclusion is fundamental to our vision. That's why we ourselves apply it within the organization.

Our full-time staff is 40% women, and we have come from four different states of the country, therefore including not just gender diversity but also diversity of origins. Our part-time staff is 75% women, and 60% of our registered volunteers are women as well.

One member of our full-time staff is from the LGBTQ+ community.

We believe that diversity of visions, opinions and realities enriches our dynamic, our approach, and our efficiency when designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating projects. This is why we have tried to include people from different paths of life, with different academic backgrounds, and from different regions and socioeconomic situations. 

As we grow, we aim to keep this in mind specially when recruiting new talents.

Being a Solver will help us strengthen and accelerate our solution. Not only will it offer us the opportunity to have access to funds, but also gain exposure, receive feedback and insights, mentoring, and the opportunity to establish alliances with colleagues from all around the world.

We are enthusiastic about being part of this MIT network, acknowledging its quality and innovation experience. Our solution has been operating successfully for a year, but we believe that no solution is perfect, and the more improvements we can make to it, the better.

We believe that the MIT Solve network is a unique opportunity to enhance our capacities and, consequently, improve the quality of life of many people in need.

Human Capital

As a growing organization, we struggle with how to better function as a high-performance team. Internal dynamics of an entrepreneurship is the backbone of its success, and we are looking forward to receiving assistance in this issue, as well as support in the establishment of recruitment policies and strategies.

Financial

Even though we have had access to funds, we want to improve our abilities to access to funding, not only through grants, but also develop a clear strategy to attract investments, contracts, and also crowdfund our model in partnership with the recipient social service organizations.

As well, as we grow to manage more resources, accountancy and administration gets more complex. We would like assistance about the best practices to perform this activities.

Legal or Regulatory Matters

Because of the restrictive regulations in Venezuela, we are looking for opportunities to register our organization in friendlier countries that may allow us to have access to funding while continue operating in Venezuela, relatively protected from harassment from the regime. As being registered in a different country is a complete new world, we would like to receive advisory about that.

Public Relations
The main enabler of our solutions is public relations. Nevertheless, so far we have relied just on our own contacts and networks, but have not developed a strategy or protocol to perform marketing activities nor orient them to the pursue of funding or partnerships. We would like to work on our public relations strategy, considering the diversity of stakeholders we have and how to better approach them.

Regarding the MIT, we would like to partner and work with:

• Water and wastewater treatment engineering, Dr. Peter Sanachan.
• MIT D-Lab

They could help us with mentoring, and training for our staff. We could receive from them the information of the state-of-the-art technologies, best practices and approaches for purifying drinking water in low-income settings, as well as how to make more sustainable, efficient, and impactful our model with the assistance of the MIT D-Lab.

Regarding other organizations, we would like to partner with the following, that have been working their Corporate Social Responsibility with water problems in developing countries:

• Procter & Gamble
• Coca-Cola
• Flow
• Eau de Paris
• Total Energies

With our solution, we promote well-being and productivity in vulnerable communities through the access to safe drinking water. Our main impacts enhance resiliency, sustainability, and human development in recipient communities.

We believe that through the GM prize we could expand our work to several communities, therefore improving their quality of life. This prize (US$ 150,000.00) will be used to afford the costs of applying our model in 24 additional communities, directly benefiting 4,800 vulnerable people in Venezuela.

Women and girls are the ones who are more affected because of the lack of access to safe drinking water because usually they are the ones who fetch it, spending lots of productive hours and exposing them to important levels of physical effort that could damage their health.

Our solution impacts especially the quality of life of women and girls by bringing close to them a safe water source, considerably reducing the time and money they spend to find water, and enabling them to perform productive activities in the saved time.

On the other hand, the 100% of the people hired to operate and manage our water purification units are women, so far. The majority of them are single mothers that previously lacked a stable source of income.

With the Innovation for Women Prize we will address 12 additional communities, focusing on those that has the biggest group of women affected by the problem we solve.