PotaVida

Bimbe, Zambia

Field visit to Bimbe, Zambia – a field visit success!

In April, Jackie Linnes and her husband Michael traveled with our World Vision Zambia partners to Bimbe, Zambia, 40km northwest of capital city Lusaka. The trip was an important milestone in our effort to improve our product before we produce it on a mass scale. It had two goals:

• Learn more about the community: what were their current drinking water activities and thoughts on solar disinfection?
• Get feedback from real-world users of our PotaVida Solar Water Purifiers: a critical step in helping us improve its utility and potential for impact.

We’re thrilled to report we met both goals. (If you’ve been in the development world a while, you know field visits can be full of surprises, not always the good kind; meeting your trip objectives is never a sure thing!). Here’s a rundown.

In terms of sourcing, we learned the people of Bimbe get drinking water from two main sources: an unprotected hand-dug well and a stream (which runs past numerous agricultural fields). In the past safe water came from a borehole and a deep protected well. But the well collapsed, and the borehole is now obstructed — it takes nearly two hours to hand pump water to the surface, say villagers. That means both sources presently yield water that’s not safe to drink.

When it came to disinfecting the water for drinking, because of World Vision’s previous WASH campaigns in Bimbe, the community is acutely aware of the dangers of unsafe water. They presently disinfect their water either with chlorine or by boiling it. The government only runs free chlorine promotion campaigns in the rainy season, so chlorine is unavailable for the dry season – six months out of the year. During that time women have to gather firewood to boil drinking water. They boil water at night, so it can cool overnight for drinking the next day.

Given these circumstances, community members were excited about using the PotaVida Solar Water Purifiers (below left). They had had the prototype purifiers for several days in advance of our visit, and were ready to discuss them with us when we arrived.

The photo at right shows the Solar Water Purifier prototypes in the community. The top bag is filled with tap water, while the bottom one contains water from the local borehole, colored by iron oxide particles.

We learned most families chose to put the purifiers on their dish drying rack: it was a readily available sunny location, where animals wouldn’t disturb the purifiers and the disinfection process (below right). We answered many questions, and we got incredibly useful feedback on the purifiers. Some examples:

• More water is better –use 10L instead of 2L bags
• Make the on/off switch easier to access
• Change the zipper top
• Brighter and different colored indicator lights would be easier to see and understand

We left our current models in the village for the community to continue testing. We’re excited with the info we came away with: the feedback from real users gives us confidence we’re on the right track, and gives us ground-truthed suggestions for ways to make our product even more useful!

October Update: Field & Microbiology Testing, Design Changes

Hello everyone!  It has been another intense month for the PotaVida team.  We have monitors in six countries for expert review, an independent university laboratory testing our monitors, and a new, more user friendly water bag that will make monitoring your solar disinfection simpler and more intuitive.

PotaVida Prototypes go to Africa, Europe and Latin America!

We currently have expert advisors in Spain, Ghana, Zambia, and Senegal reviewing PotaVida prototypes.  Special thanks to Fundacion SODIS director Matthias Saladin, World Vision Core Program Manager for Western Africa Sam Diarra, World Vision Water and Sanitation Director for Southern Africa Emmanuel Opong, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland SODIS researcher Kevin McGuigan, and WaterAid Nicaragua Country Director Joshua Briemburg.

These experts  are providing excellent feedback on the usability, desirability, and intuitiveness of the monitors. We are thrilled to have their insight into the value-add that the monitors provide to the SODIS process. In Senegal specifically, 100% of the SODIS users interviewed by Dr. Kevin McGuigan’s research group liked the monitor and supported the technology because they can easily know when their water is treated.

Use Cases: A Great Design Exercise

Charlie and Jackie collaborated with Essential Design engineer Scott Stropkay on thinking about our monitor design in the context of specific usage cases. This led to the selection of our water bag model with an integrated PotaVida monitor. We believe that an all-in-one package which doesn’t require the user to provide a container or fasten a monitor to it will simplify the disinfection process and user interaction.  The net result is a better design that is more intuitive and will safely store disinfected water.

University of Arizona Microbiological Testing is Underway

PotaVida sent four of our SODIS monitor prototypes to Dr. Chuck Gerba’s lab at the University in Arizona at the end of September. This week, the lab is performing their first tests with our monitors in order to correlate our light measurements with E. coli  die-off rates.  We’re eager to hear the results of these initial experiments. These, and the follow up tests, will be used to calibrate and evaluate our bag and bottle prototypes under diverse temperature, cloud cover, and turbidity conditions.

Thanks for reading!

From Washington DC to Kenya to Seattle…

The PotaVida team attended the Aid and International Development Forum in Washington, D.C. June 6-8th, where we met with partner World Vision and Melissa Minke from Access Afya. The trip was extremely successful, and we have new partnerships to test our solar disinfection monitors in Kenya and Ghana. The team also took a few hours to see some sights and take photos.

Just after returning to MIT from the DC conference, Dr. Linnes was again on a plane, this time to Narobi, Kenya. There she worked with Melisa Menke, founder of Access Afya, which is building health clinics in the Mukuru slum in Nairobi. Currently, families in Mukuru have to pay for water daily from an untrusted water source piped in from outside the slum. Once Access Afya clinics are up and running, Access Afya would like to use the PotaVida monitor to ensure safe, solar-disinfected water is provided to patients, and to teach these same patients how to disinfect water in their homes.

Back in Seattle, the PotaVida monitor is being featured as a part of Global Health Month at the Next50 Celebration in Seattle. We are featured in the Experience Global Health Exhibit. The ribbon cutting was on July 2nd, and the exhibit is open to the public as of July 3rd. Come see our monitors in person!

MIT D-Lab Funding and New Partners

Funding and Partners

As a start-up we are always seeking partners and funding- this month we got both!  PotaVida is very pleased to announce that the MIT D-Lab awarded PotaVida a seed grant for field testing and market research over the next 9-12 months.  The D-Lab is a group that focuses on developing and disseminating humanitarian technologies in developing countries.

Also coming from our partnership with D-Lab is a new collaboration with Cooper-Perkins, a technology and product development company that has offered pro-bono design work to PotaVida.  We are very excited to be working with their team of mechanical and electrical engineers!

Next Generation Prototypes

We have begun production of a small batch of prototypes funded by this grant.  We have ordered the new boards, and are working with World Vision to integrate these monitors into some of their existing disaster relief products.  We’ll keep you up to date on how this progresses.

Microbiological Testing in the Field

Finally, Fundación SODIS, a Bolivia-based NGO which coordinates solar water disinfection training in Latin America will be including our prototypes in upcoming microbiological testing, which will provide an external validation of the efficacy of our product.

Thanks for reading!

-The PotaVida Team

UW BPC… Grand Prize and Best Innovation awards go to PotaVida

Every year the University of Washington holds a Business Plan Competition (BPC) to identify the best idea with these four characteristics:

1) Best team
2) Best product
3) Most viable business
4) Deepest knowledge of market

This year 104 teams from 11 universities entered the competition. The teams were cut to the top 36 teams, then 16. Yesterday these 16 teams presented business plans to a panel of judges including venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and business owners.

PotaVida was judged to be the best team, and won the Grand Prize ($25K) and the Best Innovation ($2.5K) awards.

Thank you to all of the BPC staff, our advisers, especially Emer Dooley, Dave Jones, Craig Howard and Brian Strully. Also we could not have won without the support of Carbon Design Group.

Thank you!

Building the brand… PotaVida chooses a logo

Graphic designer Sam Dawson heard about PotaVida in late December. Sam was impressed with the idea, enough to volunteer his time and skills to design a logo.

Due to travel and busy schedules we didn’t get a chance to meet with Sam until last week. Over a couple of mugs of coffee at Voxx on Eastlake we met to discuss logo ideas. We started simply with a list of ideas:
1) Sun
2) Water
3) Helping the poorest of the poor
4) We are making progress

From those we tightened our concept to a key phrase: “Safe water with certainty”.

We think that captures the essence of PotaVida: taking away the uncertainty of the SODIS process. In fact, we liked it so much we made it our new motto.

Sam took our motto, and the two hour conversation and created not one but 5 logos. Now we need to choose between these logos. And we need your help.

You can contribute your thoughts and make suggestions on each of the proposed logos at our FaceBook page. The logos are in the photos section and you can add comments there.

Thanks for your feedback, and thanks to Sam Dawson for his valuable contribution!

Thanks!

edit: We’ve added the logos to this website as well. You can click on the “Logo” tab to see the options. Any comments or insights that you have you can share in the comments section of the Logo tab.