January 2008 Archives

Welcome to our blog for our water pump project. This is very exciting as we're starting to develop a solar-powered rope pump that should (if it works well) allow rural communities to pump water for drinking and farming in an efficient manner.

We've been working closely with Bobby Lambert, a development engineer who used to be director of the agency RedR. In fact, this idea of a solar-powered rope pumps comes from him. We've also had free assistance from Lachlan Bateman, a solar engineer at Solarcentury, the company that helped set up SolarAid in 2006. Lachlan did a project design for the pump.

We're now hoping that Cai Williams, a young student engineer from Bristol, will be able to spend a few months in Malawi with our partner organisation there, the Centre for Appropriate Technology, in order to test a prototype solar rope pump there.

We're also really excited as we visited a similar project in Argentina last year in a place called Bariloche. Gustavo Genusso, who founded and runs the project, is the former Chief Engineer of the nuclear reactor in Bariloche who then became a social entrepreneur and now works full time on setting up schools for disadvantaged children and running a rope pump project.

Gustavo also wants to develop a solar-powered rope pump, so we're hoping that the prototype we develop in Malawi can help him in South America.

John Keane
SolarAid Head of Programmes