Artemis Water Strategy

Water resilience for a thirsty future

Oct 01 2014

A new breed of environmental entrepreneurs -Technology for Africa, from Africa

Melesse Temescan is one example of the new breed of entrepreneurs emerging with promising water technologies out of the places that have been contending with water scarcity for decades.  Temescan’s company, Aybar LLC was among the first awarded the US/Swedish/Dutch Securing Water for Food (SWFF) grant to rapidly build his business for wide scale impact.

Aybar has designed a innovative plow to help Ethiopian farmers reduce water logging during the rainy seasons and conserve water in the dry season. In Ethiopia, water logging, or flooding, prevents cultivation of over 5 million hectares of land during the rainy season. The Aybar BBM allows the livestock used for farming to build deeper, more effective ridges to drain excess water. This plow costs $16.48 as compared with $2000 for Chinese manufactured tractors.

A career researcher for the Government of Ethiopia, Temescan was frustrated to see that his innovation was not getting onto the farms to that needed it. The story of Aybar is a story of entrepreneurship as much as it is a story of innovation. In three years,  Temescan has sold 45,000, and has been struggling to manufacture units to keep up with demand.  Only an entrepreneur from Ethiopia like Temescan could produce this kind of innovation based on existing practices and build a distribution channel so quickly. With SWFF funding, Temescan expects to sell 60,000 in the next year.

The SWFF program is a pioneering effort focusing upon individual businesses and technologies, rather than large-scale programs. Temescan, and the other 16 SWFF awardees provide a glimpse of how entrepreneurs might drive the velocity of change in the face of water scarcity.

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Agriculture, Developing World, Innovation

Sep 04 2014

Plotting new channels for water innovation– School-based marketing

Young companies are struggling to introduce new tech solutions and new ways of working with water through existing market channels: water utilities, homes and businesses. Reel Gardening has been growing rapidly by leveraging a new consumer market for locally grown food — schools.

Reel Gardening combines an innovative product with an innovative marketing strategy. It has developed a patented pre-fertilized seed tape which encases seed, fertilizer and water-retaining minerals on custom printed biodegradable paper tape. With the tape, seeds are planted at the correct depth and distance apart. Plants grow faster and healthier in a wider growing period and use 80% less water than conventional planting.

Claire Reid, the founder and CEO, was awarded a grant from the US/Swedish/Dutch “Securing Water for Food” initiative at Stockholm Water Week.

How have partnerships with schools helped you launch?
I believe that children are the best teachers for their parents. Children love figuring out new technology, while parents tend to hold back and stick with what they know. After using Reel seed tapes at school gardens, kids plant a family garden as part of their homework and get parents involved. Our agents, recruited from our school programs, follow up with sales to retailers in those neighborhoods.

How did the school partnership start?
Reel Gardening was approached by the Independant Development Trust which builds rural schools in South Africa. They had been purchasing our household gardens in a retail store and planting them in a few schools but doing it this was was cost prohibitive. They asked us if we could put together a bigger solutions targeted at schools and the School Garden in a Box was born. The program takes a seed planting project and builds a community food program.

Starting with 32 national schools in Gauteng, Limpopo, Eastern Cape, KZN, Mpumalanga and Western Cape, the program is expanding throughout South Africa. Reel has launched in the UK and is expanding to the US and Australia. “We are building our market in wealthy schools which enables us to make the product cheaper to poorer neighborhoods.”

Reel Gardening
How do you see the Securing Water for Food program driving the company’s development?

SWFF is helping finance a program with Unilever to distribute Reel tapes and product re-purchase program. This program is a game changer for my business.

What are your goals for the company for the next two years?
We want to implement in 500 schools in South Africa and build a network of 44 trainers and agents nationally and build sales in the US and Australia and maybe the UK. We are aiming to quadruple manufacturing and triple the number of employees.

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Agriculture, Developing World

Sep 01 2014

A new breed of environmental entrepreneurs -Technology for Africa, from Africa

Stockholm WWW 2014I am flying from the Silicon Valley to Stockholm to bring a new breed of start ups to International Water Week.

Securing Water for Food, a joint US/Swedish/Dutch program, selected 17 companies from an international pool of 536 applicants. The program breaks new ground on several levels. First, the program looks beyond water and sanitation in the developing world to securing water supplies for food. Second, it focuses upon innovation– technology solutions as well as business models, rather than funding new facilities and education. It focuses upon salinity, water storage as well as water efficiency and reuse.

Perhaps most daring, the program convenes private sector industry experts to review and select the most promising solutions. “Producing more food with less water is critical. With the right technology we think we can half the amount of water that is used to produce food,” says Therese Sjömander-Magnusson, water expert at Sida.

Raimond Hafkenscheid at WWW 2014Despite an explosion in the growth of urban slums over the last decade, nearly 75 percent of poor people in developing countries live in rural areas. That’s why growth in the agriculture sector has been found, on average, to be at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as growth in other sectors.

Reel Gardening, Practical Action and Aybar are some of the 17 impressive start-ups that received awards.

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Agriculture, Developing World, Innovation, Start-up Management

May 02 2014

Emerging Leaders Series: Eric Rasmussen, CEO of Infinitum Humanitarian Systems

Eric RasmussenEric retired in 2007 after 25 years of service in the US Navy that included 18 deployments and three wars to head Google NGO, InSTEDD. He now leads Infinitum Humanitarian Systems (IHS), a profit-for-purpose social business which provides advanced technology solutions for public health and capacity building in emerging markets. Their focus is Latin America.

As a disaster medicine specialist, Eric has led teams in more than a dozen disasters over the past twenty years, including the Izmit earthquake, Katrina, Banda Aceh, Haiti, Hurricane Sandy for FEMA, and the Philippines after Supertyphoon Haiyan for the Roddenberry Foundation. In addition, he has worked in war zones in Bosnia (3x), Afghanistan (twice), and Iraq (9 months).

Why did you see the need for IHS?
During the 25 years that I was in the Navy, I didn’t see that we were doing enough to support civilians in the war zones where we deployed. Rather than just bringing fire and steel on target to win hearts and minds, I thought that we might have a more engaging influence if we stopped the diarrhea that was killing their children. Where we did it, that proved true. But because we didn’t continue to do it, we’ve lost a little ground.

Ormoc, Philippines. UNHCR distribution. Aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda
Ormoc, Philippines. UNHCR distribution. Aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda

What we have found, though, is that water is a dominant issue everywhere in the developing world, particularly in post-conflict regions, but everywhere. There is a fantastic amount of waste in supplying water, for example. The government of Baja California, in the midst of a ruinous drought, quotes a figure of 88 million gallons of fresh water lost every month to graywater runoff into the ocean. They’re professionals, taking their responsibilities seriously, and that drives them crazy. We don’t do enough to reclaim graywater from showers, or to harvest rainwater or to drip-irrigate. Such things are obvious, but beyond supplying enough drinking water in communities, I saw how vital water is for hospitals, and schools, and other civilization services. They can’t work without it.

As a medical doctor with a lot of experience in natural disasters, I have personally known what its like to run out of water. With our team in the response to Supertyphoon Haiyan during November 2013, a supply flight was delayed and we ran out of water. One of the UN teams on site gave us, a team of 14, half of their last third of a jerrycan of water. When that water ran out, we all waited about 12 hours for a water delivery, trying to work, trying to ignore the thirst. Learning experience.

What do you do?
We look at new ways to reclaim used water and purify it for drinking. When we decided on this particular quest we took advantage of my nine years at DARPA and went looking for robust, small scale, energy efficient solutions still deep in someone’s garage. We found some surprisingly good options. There’s a lot of scientific and engineering creativity out there. Some of it has made it to a NASA TRL-5 or so, ready for field testing.

Now the Roddenberry Foundation has funded us, just as a pilot, to look at how we might fill the gaps in current approaches to supplying water during disaster relief.

What is the new solution for water in disaster relief?
IHS, with multiple very cool partners, has developed an approach that replaces single-use bottled water with a long-term water treatment solution on-site. We provide a robust solution during a relief effort and a long-term solution afterward. It saves dramatic amounts of water, energy, and waste, and generates no hazardous byproducts.

Our system is airlifted into an active disaster zones within a few days of the event. Rather than delivering water, it delivers a treatment solution to use the water that’s already there. We have a process to clean almost anything in water—from biological pathogens, to fuels, pesticides and fertilizers, to heavy metals like mercury and arsenic. It’s fast, robust, resilient, simple (though very high tech internally) and runs on renewable energy.

To help understand the problem we were trying to address with a business model, the usual disaster air transport is a C-130 aircraft which carries bottled water on a standardized 463L pallet. A C-130 can carry about 7,700 half-liter bottles on every trip, very roughly a thousand gallons. On the other hand, with that same load, we could ship in six of our units in a single flight and generate at least 500 gallons a day with each one, every day, for months. All we need is a water source in the disaster area, and most disaster areas have many. So instead of bringing in more bottled water by air day after day, that same C-130 can bring in medical supplies, shelter, food, and grieving relatives. Just one of our systems saves a huge amount of fuel and carbon emissions by eliminating more than a quarter of a million pounds of air transport every month.

That one system also replaces tens of thousands of single-use water bottles that litter the landscape of every disaster site for years afterward.

As the emergency response phase moves to recovery and reconstruction, we’ve designed a method for turning over the system entirely to provide a bit of economic benefit (and public health), in the recovery. We’re working with local organizations to help women establish long-term water vending businesses in these communities.

Where do you see the next big challenges for water tech?

At IHS, our opinion is that the challenges we’re about to face are not so much water technology, as:
1) Providing the renewable power for every kind of water purification,
2) Tackling the barriers to change set by policy and legislation,
3) Overcoming cultural barriers, habit and laziness in conservation.

But to stay with just tech, in our view we need to reclaim fresh water from anywhere we can get it, so I’m really excited about some work we’re doing in Mexico. We’re looking closely at some new bio-electrochemistry around bacterial biosolid degradation and the harvesting of transmembrane potentials from the resulting biofilms. The result is the conversion of pit latrine sludge to drinking water that meets all international standards plus a bit of storable energy. As of March we’ve now found it’s scalable. I find that interesting.

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Developing World, Drinking Water, Interviews

Apr 10 2014

Water at the Operational Edge– the US looks at water as a defense imperative

Afghan Supply Line, 2010

Water emerges as the new US military imperative
The high profile successes of the US Department of Defense (DoD) Energy Operations initiative have paved the way for a second wave around water.  Delivering fuel to the front lines in Afghanistan and in Iraq cost $400 a gallon, but the cost of water changes at each location.

Saving fuel in forward operating units saves more than money, it saves lives.  170 solidiers were killed in attacks on water and fuel convoys in 2007. Another 68 casualties are attributed to water deliveries during that period.

The cost of water might be tough to quantify, but when the value of water savings can be measured in lives saved, it becomes an operational imperative.  Initially, the US DoD estimated that water comprised 20% of supplies brought to forward operating units.  However, closer examination in 2010, by the Marines found that a battalion sized FOB had, on a weekly basis, 14 trucks delivering water and 2 trucks delivering fuel.

A forward operating unit can only stay on the front lines as long as its water supply lasts.  Efficient onsite water management—applying proven leading-edge onsite water treatment and water reclaim—can help front line units stay longer to complete their missions, and save lives that might be lost in delivering water.

Resupply Casualty Factors-- Afghanistan and Iraq --FY 2007

In addition, water has been identified as a “risk multiplier” by the US Quadrennial Defense Review.  Water has driven unheaval in places like Syria and Jordan.  In areas of political unrest, US defense efforts might mean bringing water technologies to help strengthen the steady flow of water.

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Developing World, Drinking Water, On-site Water Treatment, Water Policy Innovaton

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