It looks a bit like a terracotta flowerpot sitting in a white plastic pail. But the CeraMaji water filter does much more than look nice on a windowsill – it saves lives.
This modest vessel cleans drinking water of the contaminants that cause diarrheal disease, a leading cause of pediatric death in Third World countries.
It’s the brainchild of a dedicated group of University of Alberta students who took the innovation from hypothesis to sustainable, non-profit organization. Since introducing the CeraMaji filter with the Kenya Ceramics Project in 2007, they’ve now got a factory in Kiminini
“That’s my proudest moment – when I see somebody in town just going to a supermarket, picking up one of my filters and then walking out with it,” said Kenyan Ceramics co-founder Abdullah Saleh. “The real challenge is how do you motivate somebody to invest in something like that? That’s the real success, that you make people want to buy it instead of giving it to them.”
The idea for the filter was sparked while Dr. Saleh was an undergrad, working with HIV-infected mothers in Ecuador. He wondered why mothers were choosing to breastfeed their babies instead of using formula, and realized much of the reason was the contaminated water they would have to use to make the formula.
“Women end up making the difficult decision between diarrheal disease and exposing their children to HIV. And diarrheal disease is a more guaranteed cause of death under the age of five,” Dr. Saleh said. “I thought, really what I should be trying to do is to work on developing the technology to purify water cheaply and effectively.”
During the course of researching this problem, Dr. Saleh read about an intriguing technology: if you combine clay with organic materials (such as sawdust or sugar cane waste) and fire it in a kiln, you end up with a porous medium when the organic material burns off.
By this time, Dr. Saleh had been admitted to the University of Alberta medical school, where he met Abraam Isaac and Tyler van Mulligan, fellow students who shared his enthusiasm about using the technology he’d unearthed to create water filters.
“We recruited a potter in Edmonton, and we developed the first prototypes based on some half-baked notions about how pottery would work and with a lot of his guidance, we took them to the microbiology lab and started testing them,” Dr. Saleh said.
The results were promising – when giardia spores from mice feces were introduced into the water, the filters eliminated 100 per cent of the contaminants. While they had their results confirmed at a provincial lab, the students self-funded a trip to Kenya on their summer holiday to do a “needs analysis” of the country.
It was a trip that drastically changed their idea about the project.
“Initially, what we thought we would do was develop a model for how to [manufacture the filters], find a group, show them how, and they were going to do it,” Dr. Saleh said. “Obviously that wasn’t the case because when we got to Kenya, we realized the very first problem that we were facing was that the kilns they use don’t reach the temperature to make these filters.”
In addition to the technical problems of actually getting the filters made, Dr. Saleh and his medical school teammates were concerned about quality control.
“We’re trained [as physicians] to do no harm, we have to make sure we don’t harm them in the process,” he said. “We realized we’d have to build a kiln, and build a workshop, and find people to work in that workshop.”
