Along a dusty path in the heat of the Rift Valley in Kenya, Sinchore, eight years old, skips toward the nearest water hole. Tall and skinny like most Maasai people, her faded and ripped dress seems to flow about her as she follows her mother. At the brown, muddy water hole Sinchore fills her plastic yellow jerry can and ties an old cloth around the handle and then passes the cloth over her forehead so that the container rests on her back.

Women and children usually make the long trek for water. This year has been good and the nearest available water is only 2.5 kilometers (1.25 miles) away. After a long walk, Sinchore arrives with her mother at the village. They pour the water from the large containers into clear plastic bottles collected for them by ICROSS, an Irish NGO that first brought the technique to the area over ten years ago. The bottles are set on the thatched roofs of the huts. Every hut, situated in a circle and connected by thorned branches to keep wild animals out, has a couple of plastic bottles set out in the sun.

Gladys, left, and her friend Namalai near the water hole.

Gladys Maseker, a young Maasai mother of two carries a large jerry can of dirty water with the cloth strung around her forehead. She probably has strong neck muscles for such work, but her neck is not visible for the wide necklaces of colorful beads from almost her chin to her shoulders. "We have been using the solar bottles for eleven years,” says Gladys in her local language although she speaks quite good English.

“The technique kills bacteria for a long time, and helps us to save time. Now we don’t have to boil the water anymore. Water coming from solar disinfection has also a better taste. We don’t like the taste of boiled water".

Solar disinfection is easy and costs nothing. Plastic bottles are found in waste bins all over the world. A combination of heat and UV rays deactivate bacteria, but doesn’t kill them. The water can be consumed within 48 hours after being disinfected. After that period, bacteria form again.

Dr. Steve Masenke was born in this village and now heads the small clinic set up by ICROSS near the village. Together with Dr. Sylvia Gaaji they are responsible for some 40,000 Maasai villagers. "We have indeed had a decrease in cases of diarrhea since we started using the system of cleaning the water with the sun,” confirms Dr. Masenke. “According to our records, for the first 3 years, we had a 20 percent decrease in diarrhea cases, and nowadays the decrease is around 70 percent of the cases that we have".

Dr. Gaaji prescribes anti-malarial medicine to a young patient.

The man who brought this simple technique to the Maasai is Mike Meegan, cofounder of ICROSS. Mike would probably be a dot-com millionaire or a dynamic young businessman if that were where his passion lay. But Mike has always wanted to make a difference and since the age of 18, he has been living and working in Africa among some of the poorest people in the world. Speaking numerous African languages, Mike believes strongly that solutions must come from the people themselves and that together we can make a difference. Mike sees a much wider application for solar disinfection.

"It is not simply a matter of plastic bottles. If we are going to really develop this technology and take it internationally at a much bigger scale, putting it into towns, and cities, and slums, and very large communities, it can’t just be based on plastic bottles,” foresees Mike. “It has to be evolved into a technology and a method that will be able to be expanded and given freely to people in a much bigger way but, here is the magic formula, at a low cost. It cannot cost a lot of money, and it must belong to ordinary people and it must be sustainable.”

That is exactly what a group of scientists, financed by the European Union, are trying to put in place. Sodiswater (a cleaver abbreviation of solar disinfected water) is a three-year project to improve the plastic water bottle version of solar disinfection.

We met up with this international group of scientists in Almeria, Spain, one of the sunniest places on Earth. They had come to discuss their respective research into the health benefits, social considerations to get people to use this method as well as how to improve and use solar disinfection on a greater scale while keeping cost very low and using materials readily available in developing nations.

Giant mirrors at the Almeria Solar Platform.

About a half an hour out of Almeria (read blog “Sun and water bottles), an otherworldly installation of giant mirrors, pipes and towers occupies a barren, rocky valley flanked by treeless mountains. Like a scene from a science fiction film, hundreds of giant mirrors slowly move to reflect the sun’s rays to a panel on a tower. This heats water at 1,000 degrees Celsius creating highly pressurized steam from which electricity is made.

At this solar experiment station, Kevin Macguigan, Sodiswater project coordinator, walks along the giant mirrors and explains the basics.

"There are several options for disinfecting the water. There is chlorination, but that requires money for the chlorine tablets. There is filtration, but that requires money for the filters. There is also boiling, but for that you have to go out and collect the firewood. There is labor involved in that, and also in many parts of the developing world, there are embargoes, people are not allowed to collect the wood because it has an environmental impact. With solar disinfection you are using an empty plastic bottle. So you are using a zero cost sustainable resource.”

Spanish researchers at this institute are trying to better this simple idea. They have just developed a one square meter "water reactor". Six crystal tubes 1,5 meters long and 5 cm wide hold the water; around 90 minutes of solar exposure are enough to inactivate, for instance, Escherichia coli, one of the bacteria that causes gastroenteris.
 

Pilar beside her water reactor.

“This reactor has many advantages over the water bottles,” explains Pilar Fernandez, a physicist at the Almeria Solar Platform. “It can treat a larger volume of water… 20, 30, 40 and up to 50 liters at one time. Technologically more complex, it is also more expensive, but it can reduce the time for treating the water. It will also be safer because the rate of reduction of microorganisms in the water will be higher.”

In Kenya only around 40.000 people are currently using the technique to drink safer water. The project is being implemented in small communities in Zimbabwe and South Africa and pilot trials are about to begin in Cambodia. The potential is huge.

"This technique can have massive implications across a huge range of issues, from refugees, to disaster zones, war zones, tsunamis, and floods, and famines,” predicts Mike Meegan with his contagious enthusiasm.  “And that is what we all are beginning to look at now: What are the implications of such a successful idea in terms of public health for a broader population in continents where most people don’t have access to clean water? The results could be enormous, and the benefits in terms of public health could be colossal".

To see a video version of this story click here. Please read the blog of this report here.