Is the Play Pump the answer to the world's clean water problems?
Clean, fresh water is the first and most essential resource when it comes to human health. While progress has been dramatic over the last 20 years, almost ten percent of the world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, still doesn’t have access to an improved water sources (i.e. water that is piped into households, public taps, protected spring sources, tube wells dug with a borehole etc.) 1 As such water and sanitation, rightfully so, receives a great deal of funding and attention from the global development community.
In the early 2000’s an innovative charity, PlayPumps International, was set up to tackle this issue through the instillation of their PlayPump systems. Many communities need access to fresh water and many school in those communities have little or no playground equipment. PlayPump International aimed to provide both!
The idea behind the PlayPump is ingenious to say the least. A borehole is drilled and a pump mechanism is connected to a roundabout. During the day children play on the roundabout and this play has the effect of pumping water into a nearby water tower. Member of the community can then simply take their water containers to an outlet near the water tower and collect their water, without having to pump it themselves. The water tower also allows for advertisement space to be sold, any revenue gained from advertising then goes back into the maintenance of the system.
Here is a short video of the PlayPump in action:
Lovely idea, right?
When PlayPump International launched their publicity for the project many people thought so.
In fact it’s hard to get across just how much the international aid community got behind the idea. Millions of dollars were raised from Laura Bush and AOL Founder Steve Case. Jay-Z even raised $250 000 for the project through a gig specially for PlayPumps2.
The intention behind the PlayPump was commendable, providing fresh water to a community that has none while also proving play equipment for the kids. The issues with the intervention however were so extensive and so catastrophic that now the PlayPump has become synonymous with the idea of an ineffective, even damaging, aid intervention.
On paper it sounds great. Even on video it looks great! But reality is a different beast and one that is rarely kind to good intentions, little planning and no testing.
Ever since PlayPumps started to be installed in the late 90’s there were rumours around them perhaps not performing to the shiny and happy level that PlayPumps advertising would have you think. However it wasn't until around the late 2000’s that the evidence demonstrating issues with the intervention came to light.
Problem 1: Basic maths, physics and engineering
A PlayPump costs approximately four times the more standard Zimbabwe Bush Pump. This, on its own, is not a problem, perhaps the PlayPump’s were more efficient at pumping water to the surface than those pumps.
They weren't.
To get liquid up out of a boar hole an up and down stroke movement is needed. With a standard long handle pump, hard and powerful strokes with a lot of force are possible*. However, with the horizontal rotation of a roundabout, this rotation needs to be converted into a vertical pumping mechanism. This was achieved with a sort of half corkscrew and drop (see pictures right).
As such the PlayPump was horrendously inefficient (and also not like a normal roundabout to play on, clunking on every rotation and lacking in momentum), averaging out at around 245 litres per hour compared to around 1300 litres per hour for the Zimbabwe Bush Pumps3.
So not only were PlayPumps 4 times as expensive, they were also 4 times less efficient.
Problem 2: Ignorance of problem 1 and pushing ahead anyway
A minimum water requirement for an adult being served by a community pump (i.e. drinking, cooking, hand washing water) is around 15 litres per day 4.
Take a look back at the video earlier in the post. I count around 25 children there. Therefore it would take around 1 hour 50 mins of “play” on the PlayPump to provide just the people in the video with enough water for the day. Even being generous and halving that number (due to the fact that they're children) there won't be much water left for the rest of the community at the end of the day.
Also, I don’t know about you but when I was a kid around 10 minutes was enough roundabout time for me, imagine having to play on one every day for a couple hours just so you and your family have fresh drinking water. Fun quickly stops being fun when it’s vital for your survival.
This again would have been fine if it were supplementing a existing pumps.
Problem 3: They removed perfectly workable existing pumps and replaced them with PlayPumps
A survey of 100 PlayPumps was conducted in 20075. Of these 100:
- 29 had been installed on new boreholes and the remaining 71 had been installed on existing holes
-- 28 were replacing pumps that had stopped working and
-- 43 were replacing working or easily fixable pumps
Problem 4: Put it all together and what have you got…
You have imagery like this:
When you have one pump serving a community of a few hundred people and are relying on child labour to pump water inefficiently the job will eventually fall to the women of the village (because this is where this kind of work always falls).
According to comments from PlayPump users, the pumps were in constant use by women for around 6-12 hours a day. They were painful to use, as they were designed for the height of children, the elderly or pregnant found it particularly difficult, not to mention how undignified and humiliating it was for the women that could use them.
Also the final kick in the teeth was the water tower. Each inefficient turn of the wheel was made even worse as the water had to be pumped an extra 20 feet, against gravity, up to the water towers.
Here’s a quote for an investigator that sums up the futility of the PlayPump:
”With every rotation I could hear a small splash of water in the tank, followed by a splash of water into the lady’s bucket on the ground beside us. Because the tank wasn’t full (which I figure they almost never were), the lady was essentially having to exert herself to move the water 20ft upwards, just to have it come back down again. I don’t know what you think, but to me it seemed like a bit of unnecessary extra effort to fill a bucket.”
Moral of the story
This story illustrates the importance of testing an intervention before adopting it, even if it logically sounds like it would work. Shoddy interventions can then be shelved and successful interventions to be scaled accordingly.
PlayPump International were not wrong to try this idea, they captured people's imagination and got them to donate a huge amount of money. The only issue was that the imagination that was captured was based on a lie.
Not all charities are equal in the good they can do, but this shouldn’t mean that we should become cynical and jaded towards charity we just need to optimise a little better and perhaps question our motives towards giving. Are we giving to make ourselves feel good or are we giving to genuinely make lives better for others? If it is the former we run the risk of falling for the PlayPump, if it is the latter we may want to consider taking an extra 5 or 10 minutes out of our day to check that we are giving in the most effective way possible. The website GiveWell is a fantastic resource that can help you towards this end.
So to answer the title question: Oh dear god no, let's fund interventions that work instead
*There was no way for me to write this section without it sounding dirty as all hell, so I thought I’d lean into it.
About me:
My name is Richard, I blog under the name of @nonzerosum. I’m a PhD student at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I write mostly on Global Health, Effective Altruism and The Psychology of Vaccine Hesitancy. If you’d like to read more on these topics in the future follow me here on steemit or on twitter @RichClarkePsy.
Referenced Sources:
[1] Our World in Data: Water access resources & sanitation
[2] Look to the Stars: Jay-z fundraising for PlayPump
[3] Objects in Development: Ten problems with the PlayPump
[4] Sphere Handbook: Water supply standard
[5] Obiols, A.L. & Erpf, K. 2008, Mission Report on the Evaluation of the PlayPumps installed in Mozambique, Centro de Formação Profissional de Àgua e Saneamento, SKAT, Mozambique.
Additional sources:
The Guardian: Africa’s not-so-magic roundabout
Humanosphere: How PlayPumps are an example of learning from failure
Really interesting read. Well written and informative, thank you
I wonder if some of this "charity" is guilt for all the resources that were stolen from these communities. Why else would people throw money at such an ineffective solution?
Keep posting!
@kabir88
Hey, thanks! Strangely enough, effectiveness isn’t really talked about much as you’d think in the charity sector. A successful charity is often one that is good at raising money and is seen to be doing good, rather than actually doing good (although the two can obviously overlap). This is why I really like the idea of Effective Altruism trying to use evidence and reason so as to do the most good possible. It’s not about being cynical of charity but instead it’s about being skeptical and, importantly, building from there to an action that works well.
Seems like I'm seriously late for the upvote-party here, this post seems to be really undervalued.
The "number 1" at the illustration already begs for a proper discussion long time before deploying anything. Children being used as a source of energy?
Already before reading the rest of the article, I'm a bit torn between "that will never work out" and "right, why not?". Children do indeed spend a lot of energy during play. Make the pumping activity sufficiently fun, and the children will indeed pump. Appeal to the competitive instinct can also be used, like having some measurement on how many liters of water was pumped during a five-minute period, the children can try to beat each other on the fastest pumping as well as beat their previous records.
Some people may scoff at the idea of "child labour". Then again, the Wikipedia article very clearly states that the problem with child labour is when it "deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful". As long as the work is playful, fully volunteer, educational and the child doesn't take time off from school for doing the work, I have no problem with that.
Adults too, in some parks (at least in Norway and Russia) there exists public exercise equipment, that potentially could have been used for harvesting "free" energy.
If this really can be utilized as a profitable source of energy (i.e. as compared to alternatives - like putting up some solar panels or a diesel engine), someone probably would have already thought of it before. At least the energy-source-part of the pumping system ought to be thoroughly and properly field-tested before building the rest of the pumping system. And even if it theoretically could be possible to put up equipment that harvests energy from playing children, the idea of doing it through a roundabout seems obviously flawed.
The fun part of the roundabout is the momentum, the lack of friction, and that children with limited force and limited energy input can get the heavy thing spinning quite fast, and that it will continue spinning. Sometimes playgrounds can be found where an the roundabout has become old and worn, and has significant friction. Children will probably try to play with it for a short while, but it's not that interesting to play with a roundabout when the energy is just disappearing.
On that photo above with two ladies "playing", there is also a perfectly working diesel or petrol engine standing right behind which could relatively easily be utilized to power the pump.
Hey, thanks! Yes, I was quite proud of this post, even if it didn’t get a payout as high as some of my others.
Ha! We have a rule of thumb in public health, if you have to google the definition of Child Labour then there is probably an issue with your intervention!
Yes in theory it’s a nice idea but that’s where this story should have ended. Someone should have sat down with a pen and pencil and done the maths or perhaps listen to the local communities and ask them what they wanted/needed. I always say that this is a story that teaches us to be skeptical, but we have to then do the hard work of not becoming cynical because of it, it’s a hard line to walk sometimes.
One can wonder so many times, also when it comes to decisions made by politicians or bureaucrats, if those decisions are made due to incompetence or due to corruption.
In this case, I wonder how many working with the PlayPump concept that really believes in the concept. Of all the funding coming from public sources and bigger private funds, I wonder how much is given due to gullibility vs how much is given due to corruption.
I certainly hope incompetence, belief and gullibility is the main reasons why this project is (still) getting funding.
I was getting very ready to slam on this idea. Some of my work touches on water and sanitation in the developing world and (as I now can guess you are very aware), that world is filled with innovative, well-intenioned ideas that fail terribly due to lack of thinking through, especially engineering analysis.
Thanks for writing up this example in a way that's easy for others to follow and in way which is neither pessimistic nor negative, just honest. I'm strongly going to suggest it as a reading component to the faculty members I work with who give lectures on the topics.
Thank you so much for saying so! Yes that's the plan, try to bring some skepticism into global health/aid without encouraging cynicism. I highly appreciate you passing it around, what kind of work are you involved in?
I'm a grad student in civil engineering - specifically the microbiology involved in waste treatment and hygeine.
Problem #2 jumped to my mind as soon as I read the intro. Glad that you told us it was true.
Okay, how about this scenario though:
Maybe the Play Pump people should have done the math like I did to know that it was an infeasible idea.
Well there is someone in the comments here arguing for free enegy devices so maybe thats a better option! Although everyone that makes them are ultimately killed off by the elites, so maybe not.
I'd not heard of this "solution" before. Thanks for the well written article. Have you seen Poverty, Inc? It covers quite a few well-meaning attempts to reduce poverty that, nonetheless, backfire. Maany people in many countries need help, but that the help is often designed from outside without the kind of local knowledge needed to both address poverty, but more importantly, grow the local economy so that poverty reduction is sustained. Even seemingly good ideas, like by-one-give-one shoes can disrupt an economy and prevent it from growing. While I support a strong social safety net, I find myself continuously going back to Hayek's views on the importance of local knowledge and the difficulty of centrally designed social engineering solutions.
I have not, its looks like its on Netflix’s though so I'll give it a watch. That said I am usually very skeptical of documentaries as a source of evidence.
I agree entirely with the listening aspect, this is why I really like GiveDirectly as a charity or developing capacity in a health system, rather than just building a hospital that then cannot be staffed.
It's hard we have so much money in comparison, there must be a way to use it so that it benefits others. Finding that however is extremely difficult.
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The air we all breath contains unlimited source of free water. All we need are free energy devices to power air dehumidifiers to extract the water from the air.
THE ICE IN YOUR FRIDGE CAME FROM THE AIR.
Go to http://www.free-energy-info.com
There are thousands of free energy patents.
Interesting, what do you do if there is 0% humidity? Also these free energy devices of which you speak, where can I get my hands of one of those?
As long as the Pacific * Atlantic oceans exist, there is no such thing as 0% humidity. Where do you think clouds come from?
Because of the 200 trillion dollar a year energy Mafia, anyone naive enough to openly sell free energy devices ALWAYS meets an untimely end... fast acting cancer, car accident, burglary murder, directed energy weapon, or just plain old fashioned murder, etc. etc.
I am afraid you have to make them yourself in absolute secrecy. The easiest ones to make are:-
1/ The Motor/Generator of Robert Adams.
http://www.free-energy-info.com/Chapter2.pdf
2/ The Transformers of Thane Heins.
http://www.free-energy-info.com/Chapter3.pdf
If you going to make and sell them yourself, then sell them on the Dark Web for untraceable Crypto currency like Monero.
Tell NOBODY ELSE that knows you. Not your wife, not your brother, not your best friend; Otherwise you have effectively signed your own death warrant. Because they will tell someone else, who will then tell someone else. Keep your friends and family safe by telling NO ONE that you are making these free energy devices.
The 200 trillion dollar a year energy Mafia are psychopaths who will stop at nothing to protect their hegemony over the energy we all use.
They murdered 3 million Iraqi men women and children over which currency Saddam Hussein wanted to sell Iraqi oil for, before the Iraq war.
That's why the Dollar is enforced as the currency of petroleum. Whoever controls energy controls the destiny of mankind.
And whoever prints the Dollar (the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank) gets a mafia-like piece of the action from every country's economy.
That is because, EVERYTHING we touch is manufactured with energy. If we are ever 'PERMITTED' to have free energy. Humanity will begin a new GOLDEN AGE of abundance. Energy is 70% of the cost of everything we do.
I am too scared to make and sell these devices myself; so I am just content to spread the information on social media.
I see. Not my area of science but I'm guessing that the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics might get in the way at some point or other.
I studied electrical engineering at London University. I was brain-washed into believing that a transformer could never be 100% efficient, when in fact the complete opposite is true.
I was a true Zealot of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. Now I am an Apostate because I have finally woken up to the fact that the same people who truly did the 2001 September 11th attacks on New York city, also control our EDUCATION, banking, our media (film, TV, publishing, etc.), our medicine, our politicians, our governments, and our ENERGY. You know who I am talking about because you are not stupid.
They think we are all stupid, and hate humanity so much that they call the rest of us goyem (cattle).
At every opportunity, these satanists have held back the spiritual elevation & TRUE scientific advancement of the human race.
Ask yourself where the energy that holds a bar magnet to a fridge door comes from. Why does a non magnetic metal bar not have the energy to hold on to your fridge door?
Where does the energy that holds a bar magnet to a fridge door come from?
Is it not free energy?
The way to successfully extract that energy is via a collapsing magnetic field, such as utilized in the two working practical examples I have already stated:-
1/ The Motor/Generator of Robert Adams.
http://www.free-energy-info.com/Chapter2.pdf
2/ The Transformers of Thane Heins.
http://www.free-energy-info.com/Chapter3.pdf
My friend, before powered flight (aeroplanes) was invented, prominent professors (paid shills) at leading universities got up and declared that powered flight was impossible, and anyone who did not agree with them was a crackpot.
Now the situation is reversed... the crackpots are the ones who believed powered flight was impossible.
Which side of history would you like to be on?
Great information
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