IXL Social Enterprise Case Studies Water March 2011 | Page 3

Getting Safe Water and Sanitation to the Bottom of the Pyramid through Bold and Game-Changing Innovations

A little girl’s face said it all—a look of strength and
seriousness beyond her years—as she bent down to
dunk a bright orange-colored jug into an old rusty
barrel of polluted water. Tilting the jug on its side, she
waited patiently for the moment the murky water filled
to the very top and then, as she had done countless
times before, strained to lift it back up into her arms.
After regaining her balance, the little girl turned
toward a dark stream of open sewage and trudged
back down the beaten path to her family’s shack, her
tiny image slowly fading into the distance… .
“At that moment, I knew my life was going to be
about bringing safe drinking water and sanitation to
people living without it,” said Gary White.
This “moment” dates back to Gary’s undergrad days
in 1984 when he visited Guatemala with the volunteer
organization of engineering students that he had
founded at University of Missouri-Rolla (now called
Missouri University of Science and Technology).

“Where is the water?”
Today, a group of Haitian women and girls in Portau-Prince gave up on waiting for the local water
truck to arrive at their slum’s street corner. They had
been standing in line with their jugs for over two
hours with no truck in sight and no clue as to when
the next one might decide to appear. Instead, they
embarked on their usual alternate plan: a 45-minute
round-trip trek past the outskirts of the city, through
a grassy trash-laden field, and finally up to a creek
of brown water and floating garbage. As they dipped
their jugs into the murky water, a black-haired pig
just a few feet away urinated and defecated into the
same creek.15

“When will it arrive?”
A quick ten-minute walk to a nearby water standpost
for Mrs. Kolanchi and her three daughters morphs
into an hours-long process of waiting and waiting—
the line does not even begin to move until the water
flows, and nobody is ever quite sure if and when that
might happen (in one hour, two hours, three…?).
Luckily, Mrs. Kolanchi’s daughters attend school, but
their studies are hurt when they have to miss classes
in order to collect water. They wish they could focus
on school rather than worry about collecting water.16

Overview of the challenge
Clean water and sanitation is an issue for over a
billion people
Water is life. It is a plain and simple fact that
we all need to drink safe (disease-free) water in
order to survive. And yet for too many people
in the developing world, water is death: about
3.5 million people are killed by water-related
diseases each year, 98 percent of which live in
developing countries. Something as preventable
as diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children
under the age of five,