Print section
Print Rubric:
An innovative cure for broken pumps
Print Headline:
Pay as you drink
Print Fly Title:
Water in Africa
UK Only Article:
standard article
Issue:
France’s next revolution
Fly Title:
Pay as you drink
Location:
KERR LIEN
Main image:
20170304_mad001.jpg
IN THE mid-2000s Playpumps International, a charity, hit on a photogenic way of providing clean water to African villages: a pump powered by children playing on a merry-go-round. Donors and celebrities pledged more than $16m. But the system was costlier than alternatives, and needed so much “playing” that it started to look like thinly disguised child labour. It became a byword for wasteful Western aid—but far from the only example.
At any time around a third of the water infrastructure in rural sub-Saharan Africa, …Economist.com
