Despite having seen some really dumb “development” ideas in the past waste a large amount of time and money, I recently came across something so… wrong, that it actually made me angry enough to write about it!
According to Wikipedia, the PlayPump Water System (shown above) is…
“… like a playground merry-go-round attached to a water pump. The spinning motion pumps underground water into a 2,500-liter tank raised seven meters above ground. The water in the tank is easily dispensed by a tap valve. According to the manufacturer the pump can raise up to 1400 liters of water per hour from a depth of 40 meters. Excess water is diverted below ground again.”
It was launched with much fanfare and $16.4 million in funding in 2006 with the intention to impact over 10 million people in Africa by 2010. The plan was to have over 4000 of these at a cost of $14,000 a piece. Three year later, a story published in The Guardian explained how the innovation that theoretically made sense had badly failed in reality. According to the Sphere Project quoted in the story, the pumps “require children to be playing non-stop for 27 hours in every day to meet the 10 million figure.” Others like WaterAid argued against “the high costs ($14,000, excluding drilling), the complexity of the pumping mechanism (making local operation and maintenance difficult), the reliance on child labour and the risk of injury.” There were far more cheaper, more conventional solutions available that did not rely on children driving a merry-go-round 24/7. The project was disbanded some time later and even the website for PlayPumps International, the parent NGO, is now offline.
It’s important to consider where such ideas come from.
Since large, supply side solutions like better policies or more efficient delivery mechanisms have been unable to solve complex development issues like lack of access to clean drinking water that still affect millions of people in poor countries, policy makers and development practitioners have been forced to think out-of-the-box. Faced with an adaptive challenge, this drive to imagine unconventional solutions has produced many outstanding innovations like CellScope and Open Data Kit that are pushing the envelope. However, it has also given development professionals the liberty to “try” ideas that make a good story at the moment without the risk of any serious repercussions later. Ideas like the PlayPump that, pardon me for saying this, would never see the light of day in a developed country like the United States.
I was introduced to the PlayPump earlier this week in the Foundations of Public Health class I’m taking this semester at UC Berkeley as a graduate student in the Development Practice program. After watching a brief documentary that explained the various aspects of the project, we were tasked with coming up issues in their approach and what they should have done instead to succeed. As people gave one idea after another on how they could have advertised the benefits better, engineered the merry-go-rounds better or surveyed the population’s needs better, I sat there wondering about something more fundamental: would people in the United States be willing to have a water supply that required making their children pump water, perhaps, all day long?
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
The Golden Rule needs to be a guiding principle in development. More on that soon.
Originally published here.