Nairobi, Kenya is facing an ever-increasing water shortage, and the city government has come up with an innovative method of combatting the city’s increasingly dire lack of affordable clean water.
In an effort to make clean water accessible and affordable to the people in poor areas of Nairobi city, the Kenyan government has installed communal water dispensers, otherwise known as ‘water ATMs’ or ‘H2O ATMs.’
These water vending machines allow individuals to fill their containers with water for a subsidised price, paying for it with pre-paid smart cards. This allows them to access fresh water with the mere swipe of a card for as little as half a Kenyan shilling (half a US cent) per 5 gallons of water.
The Nairobi government, in collaboration with Danish water engineering company Grundfos Lifelink, has also recently brought four water ATMs to Mathare, the Kenyan capital’s second-largest poor neighbourhood and plan to expand the project to other slum areas in the city as soon as possible, according to Mbaruku Vyakweli, an official at the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company.
For Nairobi’s many slum dwellers, who have never known the luxury of simply turning on a tap to access fresh water and have had to rely on natural sources of drinking water that were often unsafe or the unscrupulous water vendors who would hike the price of water as high as 30 shillings per 5 gallons, these water ATMs are a blessing. For the first time they can access affordable, clean, healthy water whenever they want.
Other areas that have used this solution are India, where water ATMs are changing social behaviours according to UN reports; where collecting water was always seen as a woman’s job, the technology is appealing to men who can now be seen collecting water to show off their tech savvy and ability to earn.
With around 700 million people in 43 countries suffering from water scarcity, this type of innovation could go far to alleviate the problems experienced in these water-stressed regions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, which has the largest number of water-stressed countries of any region.
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