Getting water to run uphill

Maryann Bird
July 04, 2007
An innovative Philippine company has applied an old idea – the ram pump -- to provide impoverished hillside villages with clean water. Auke Idzenga of AIDFI, a 2007 Ashden Awards winner, told Maryann Bird about it.
"To many villagers, the increase in their agricultural output due to the ram pumps is astonishing. Many did not believe it possible to get water to flow up to the higher elevations."
In countless rural hillside villages in developing countries, water can be a major problem. When it’s not falling from the clouds, making the steep, rocky terrain a dangerous place to tread, fresh water isn’t readily accessible to local people as they eke out their living. With precious water supplies needed for drinking and cooking, there is often little left for adequate hygiene, sanitation and agricultural use. Such circumstances have trapped generation after generation in poverty and illness.
Take the island of Negros, in the Philippines, for example. Many people lost their livelihoods in Negros – the fourth-largest isle in the Philippine archipelago – after sugar prices collapsed in the 1980s. Conflict broke out, some of which continues to this day. Deforestation, too, has begun to take a toll, leading to greater drought in the warmer months and the abandonment of some land.
On the island, many villagers have to descend the steep slopes twice daily to collect water from springs, streams and rivers in the valleys below. They then carry it back uphill in jerry cans on a shoulder yoke, burdened by the weight and always in jeopardy of stumbling and sliding on the hillsides.
To their rescue has come the Alternative Indigenous Development Foundation Inc (AIDFI). The organisation was founded in the early 1990s, growing from the shared ideas and dreams of Philippine union organiser Leonidas Baterna, Dutch-born development worker Auke Idzenga and several colleagues with long years of grassroots experience in the Philippines. Their vision: “a society where technology systems exist in harmony with nature” and where, through sustainable development, “people share and live in abundance and happiness and where there is justice, freedom and equality”. On a practical level, that has meant the development and production of simple, sustainable water pumps.
Under Idzenga’s leadership in the field of appropriate technology – technology that is durable, relatively inexpensive and made of easily found, easily replaceable materials – AIDFI has designed and installed 98 ram pumps in 68 Philippine hillside communities.
For developing a pump built to last at least 20 years, and then bringing clean water to more than 15,000 people so far, Negros-based AIDFI has been honoured as a renewable energy pioneer. At the prestigious Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy in London on June 21, 2007, Idzenga accepted a