Haiti has long had difficulty supplying clean drinking water to its more than 9.7 million inhabitants, a situation compounded by last year's devastating earthquake and more recently by a cholera outbreak that has claimed more than 3,800 lives since October. Whereas the most promising short-term solution to this problem has been treating household water—often collected from bacteria-infested rivers, streams and wells—with chlorine, the logistics of delivering disinfectants and monitoring their use in a country largely devoid of transportation infrastructure has greatly hindered progress.

As a result, aid workers often have difficulty reaching families in rural Haiti to ensure they have enough microbe-killing chlorine and are using it properly. Without regular visits—every month or so—rural Haitians typically revert to drinking unclean water, which helps spread cholera and other diarrheal infections.

Only about 4 percent of Haitians living in rural areas have water piped into their homes, says Michael Ritter, national program officer and CEO of Deep Springs International (DSI), a nonprofit based in Léogâne, not far from the epicenter of the January 2010 quake that killed about 220,000 people. "That means people leave the home to get their water and bring it home," he adds. Travel times vary from region to region, but more than one third of rural Haitians travel more than 30 minutes to obtain water. Even in more urban areas such as the capital city of Port-au-Prince, only 21 percent of Haitians have a household water connection.

Ritter and his DSI colleagues have seen the problem firsthand, which is why they are teaming with Nokia Corp. and the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health to create a mobile data-gathering platform they hope to begin rolling out by the end of the month. As part of the project, DSI community health workers will affix radio-frequency identification tags (RFID) to the 19-liter buckets they provide Haitian families to store their drinking water. These workers will then use mobile phones equipped with near-field communication (NFC) capabilities to read the tags (confirming that a particular bucket assigned to a particular family has been visited) and then relay information about the water's condition via short message service (SMS) texts to a database back at DSI's headquarters.

The goal is for DSI to be able to reach more than the 35,000 families they currently serve throughout Haiti. Given DSI's limited funding and personnel, more accurate tracking of which families need careful monitoring (as opposed to those that are inherently more diligent in cleaning their water) is expected to help the organization better allocate its resources.

The number-one factor that has determined the success of DSI's clean water program to date is how often health workers visit households. "If a family had received a visit, they treated their water," Ritter says. "If a family was not visited, it was 50–50 as to whether they treated their water."

Coming clean
DSI and other aid organizations in Haiti focus on treating water at the home rather than at the source because, even if the water sources could be decontaminated, there is a risk of recontamination as the water is brought back to the home. DSI has been delivering water treatment systems (which essentially consist of a covered 19-liter bucket with a spigot at the bottom) and a locally manufactured chlorine solution it has labeled Gadyen Dlo (Creole for "water guardian") since 2007. Gadyen Dlo is a 0.7 percent sodium hypochlorite liquid solution used to treat drinking water. It takes 30 minutes for one seven-milliliter capful of solution to kill enough microbes in 19 liters of water for that water to be potable. "It's simple, it works and it's cheap," Ritter says.

A 240-milliliter bottle of Gadyen Dlo costs about $1.25 and can last as long as two months, depending on household size. DSI health workers use a pool-testing kit to analyze the chlorine level of a five-milliliter sample of drinking water—if less than the recommended amount of Gadyen Dlo is present, the water may not be safe to drink.

Tech solution
Now DSI is working with the Nokia Research Center (NRC) in Palo Alto, Calif., and U.C. Berkeley's School of Public Health to put as many as 50 Nokia 6212 mobile phones in the hands of DSI health workers as part of a pilot project. The hope is that DSI will be able to document visits more quickly and accurately than it can with its current paper-based system. Under the current system, most DSI health workers fill out forms that may take several days to reach the organization's main office.

3 Comments

1. 1. Dash1 10:15 PM 2/20/11

   Excellent idea, combining RFID chips and cell phones to accomplish a difficult but very important task quickly and accurately. Very creative.

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2. 2. Daniel35 11:00 PM 2/23/11

   I understand that the Cholera germ is killed by boiling temperatures. (Some people feel it's the action of boiling, in both sterilizing and cooking, but I'm quite sure it's only the temperature that does it.) I haven't seen it mentioned yet that one can bring water to that temperature with a relatively small heat source and a principle called counter-current heat exchange. The heat from the boiled water is mostly recovered to heat the incoming water, which needs only a small additional heat source to bring it to boiling.
   
   A minimal system would include a continuous flow of water, a long, straight piece of well insulated pipe, a somewhat longer piece of smaller diameter copper (a good conductor of heat) tubing, a few pipe fittings and a "tank", anything from a standard water heater tank to a covered METAL bucket. The top of the tank should also be insulated. The only heat needing to be added is that lost through insulation, or where it's lacking, and a somewhat higher temperature of output water, depending on the length of the pipe and the quality of insulation.
   
   The insulated pipe is attached to the tank, near the top, in a horizontal position. The copper tubing is straightened, put through the length of the pipe, with the end bent down near the bottom of the bucket. The other end is attached to a water source, maybe a funnel to be kept full with a bucket. The first water through the system should be treated with a Chlorine solution, before heat, perhaps a small fire, is applied and until the tank reaches boiling temperature.
   
   Consult an engineer and a doctor for more details and anything I may have forgotten.

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3. 3. frontierscientist 05:19 AM 7/3/12

   #MoMoCopenhagen #greenclimate #cleantech Excellent idea---cheap $10 cellphones with text messaging are available in the 3rd world, and are a good way of passing on health info in a country without a good infrastructure...
   
   We are working on similar m-health and e-mobile-health solutions for Europe, Asia, and South American
   Mobile Monday Denmark twitter.com/frontiersci
   Copenhagen Cleantech Cluster info@cphcleantech.com

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