#localtonational

The PlayPump: What went wrong (or why didn't we know right away?)

Trevor Field, a retired South African advertising executive, had done well in life and wanted to give back to his community. He noticed that in many rural villages around the eastern Cape, the burden of collecting water fell mainly to the women and girls of the household. Each morning, he'd see them set off to the nearest borehole to collect water. They used leaky and often contaminated hand-pumps to collect the water, then they carried it back through the bush in buckets weighing 40 pounds. It was exhausting and time-consuming work.

"The amount of time these women are burning up collecting water, they could be at home looking after their kids, teaching their kids, being loving mothers," Field tells Costello. He knew there had to be a better solution.

Field then teamed up with an inventor and came up with the "play pump"

To cover maintenance costs, he proposed selling ads on the sides of the water tower. He said the PlayPump model would be a big improvement over the hand pumps that Africans have struggled with for years. 

“Once the pump breaks, and it takes more than three months to repair, people in these communities no longer trust the PlayPump because they are demoralized,” he tells her. 

Field had made his career in advertising, but when he heard about this new device, he formed a company and started making PlayPumps himself. 

To cover maintenance costs, he proposed selling ads on the sides of the water tower. He said the PlayPump model would be a big improvement over the hand pumps that Africans have struggled with for years. 

A report commissioned by the Mozambique government on the PlayPump that was never released, cited similar problems with the pumps that Costello was seeing – women finding it difficult to operate; pumps out of commission for up to 17 months; children not playing as expected on the merry-go-rounds, and maintenance, "a real disaster," the report said. Field was reluctant to speak about the problems. But in Mozambique's capital, Costello meets with John Grabowski. His group, Save the Children, worked with Field to install dozens of pumps in Mozambique just before Grabowski became the group's country director. “In December of 2007, all of the pumps were operational,” he said. “Right now there are only 13.”  Save the Children was reluctant to say that the problems with their PlayPumps were, in part, their own doing, since it turns out they'd chosen poor or unsuitable sites for installation. They were then slow to resolve complaints from the field.  The Mozambique government report in part blamed Save the Children itself for not properly testing sites and the quality of water at those sites, before they installed PlayPumps. The agency was receiving complaints about the PlayPumps “pretty much right after installation,” Grabowski tells Costello.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/video_index.html

NOTE