A water pump for the people
Inventor Martin Fisher designs easy irrigation tools for African farmers.
By Peter Smith| Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor/ July 23, 2008 edition
Courtesy of the Lemelson-MIT Program
Pump it up: KickStart founder Martin Fisher uses a manual irrigation pump, called the Super-MoneyMaker, one of a few that he invented.
Cambridge, Mass.
As an aid worker in Africa, Martin Fisher says he saw a twofold problem: A lack of irrigation made it difficult for impoverished rural farmers to make money, and the irrigation pumps provided by many foreign aid programs lay broken and unused.
“All too often we do more harm than good,” says Mr. Fisher. “I realized that when it comes down to it, a poor person has only one need: A way to make more money.”
Fisher, an aluminum expert by training, has developed a series of low-cost, manual water pumps that can be used to irrigate farms up to two acres in size. In turn, farmers can increase their yields and grow produce for market.
“It’s providing a tool. If that’s all it was that would be good,” says Erik Hersman, a South African expat who blogs about ingenuity on the continent at Afrigadget.com. “But what Martin Fisher’s doing is he’s encouraging people to start a business – to be entrepreneurs.”
Sometimes, Mr. Hersman says, these tools and the money they create spur additional innovation and spin-off businesses, like pumping services.
Aid, not handouts
One of the more popular pumps Fisher has designed, the Super-MoneyMaker Pump, looks a little like a baby blue Stairmaster workout machine. When a farmer steps on the foot pedal, its pistons convert the stomp into a strong suction that can draw water uphill.
The pump’s durable, lightweight design is built with replaceable parts, and swapping in new pieces doesn’t require any tools.
“But, there’s no point in designing it if it can’t get to people,” Fisher says.
To distribute the pumps, he and his business partner, Nick Moon, established KickStart in 1991 (they later incorporated as a San Francisco-based nonprofit in 2001). The group now has offices in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mali. It has 225 employees, all but six of whom grew up near the KickStart office where they work. There’s even a YouTube video promoting the tool. The pumps cost as little as $100, which Fisher says is the true market price, not subsidized by his group.
“We don’t give anybody anything,” he says. “It’s technology and the power of marketplace that can take people out of poverty. It’s really about the power of design and technology.”
Today’s push for “appropriate technology” has its roots in the 1970s oil crisis and a 1973 essay collection by British economist E.F. Schumacher, “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.”
Some early adherents, like the now-defunct New Alchemy Institute, designed labor-intensive tools that saved resources to reduce environmental impact, but lacked a sustainable way to fund and distribute the technology.
Now, small-scale, human-centered designs appear to be gaining traction among development groups and high-tech companies attempting to distribute “appropriate” mobile devices that are ergonomic, accessible, and worth hard-earned money.
International Development Enterprises (IDE) has also designed treadle irrigation pumps, many of which were distributed in Bangladesh.
The importance of irrigation
Fisher says an irrigation tool holds the most potential to lift a family out of poverty, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that only 5 percent of land is irrigated, compared with 30 percent to 40 percent of Asia.
These KickStart microirrigation pumps draw from groundwater, which could be depleted with a high concentration of pumps but are less damaging to the environment than flood or channel irrigation.
“Nobody’s going to look after the environment if they can’t take care of their kids,” Fisher says. “They’re going to do whatever they can do to survive.”
Because the pumps aren’t powered by electricity or cheap fuel, “It has a built in disincentive to overuse,” says Casey Brown, an assistant research scientist at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society in Palisades, New York. “The potential seems to outweigh the risks.”
At a recent conference in Cambridge, Fisher’s work earned him the $100,000 Lemelson MIT Award for Sustainability. He says he hopes to use the funds to refocus his efforts back in the lab, developing more efficient pumps and rapidly creating additional prototypes.
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Comments
2. James | 07.23.08
I have to disagree with Comment #1 by Lewis - when a society can grow enough food to support itself, it tends to have SMALLER families - not larger ones. The use of children as ‘tools’ is negated when you have mechanical devices - just ask the Industrial Revolution. Not having to have a dozen kids in the field scrabbling for roots and berries will also free up the women to be educated. FOOD first, then Education and “Civilization” (which I assume is what you mean by “supressing t[r]ibalism.”
3. Felipe P. Manteiga | 07.24.08
Congratulations. The nemesis of many appropriate technology products in the past was the absence of the entrepreneurial link. Many technologies were cost effective, but no systematic effort was made to work through the market. Water has become a major challenge, may yet rank as the greatest challenge. Well done.
Yes, education is crucial, but it does not have to be shaped by our own patterns.
Homo habilis began using tools; homo sapiens sapiens is not that far removed from our ancestors–the right tool for the right job is still the mantra of most tool users.
Most of Africa has low population density and really low per capita consumption.
Let’s support their development by applying our knowledge to design and help their entrepreneurs produce and market the right tools for the job…that is good.
5. PS Shrivastava | 07.25.08
I have read with interest innovative pump designed and developed by Mr Martin Fisher. I would be interested to get further details of the design for possible manufacture and marketing in India. The sole objective will be to meet water requirement of farmers on cost basis of India as acute scarcity of water is being faced in the sub-continent.May I request an early response please.
6. Jon | 07.25.08
The industrial revolution led to smaller families, this is true. But this is an appallingly misleading statement: the same technology and food surplus that led to reduced family size was responsible for an initially plummeting life expectancy and growth rate followed by the most dramatic boom in the course of human events. Tracking greenhouse gas levels, pollution, or any factor among a host of others including population will yield a dramatic, spiking graph starting about 200 years ago. The dissolution of the plantation family and the formation of the nuclear family did not solve population and disease issues … we were fortunate enough to have an expanding border and an expanding medical field. In fact, sanitation was further complicated by urbanization and industrialization (as exemplified by the initial death rate increase and fertility drop as pollution and disease tormented urbanites). Of course, we had an influx of immigrants as well, and our population would gradually stabilize if immigration were ignored.
Industrialization (and Democracy) are not comprehensive cures for societal woes. Increased sanitation comes with stronger diseases and weaker immune systems, making the sanitation more necessary and its absence more fatal; it also leads to a healthier, longer-living, populations. Industrialization squeezes these people together, robs them of sleep and forces them into a hierarchical wealth structure (all sorts of problems with a wealth gap …) and robs cropland from this large, squeezed-together population that is incidentally more prone to strong diseases spreading faster through cities. Oh, and life-long diseases have more time to spread, the catch-22 of miraculous treatments (which I do support, despite the mention … I do not want to cull AIDS sufferers) that fall short of cure.
So far we have boosted our population, and eaten away at resources and cropland, for the sake of profit, that our descendants will need to survive. Time passes. Here we are, descendants of industrialism, sitting in a sinking ship of environmental, epidemiological, social, agricultural nightmare watching the world around us take up industrialism with the same wild abandon we had, 200 years ago. This is a problem. Especially considering the enormous populations in many of these nations. There is not enough food in a world full of sky-scrappers for all the workers in them. We need room for fragile ecosystems, for farm land, and for breathing.
Eliminating “tribalism” has very little to do with improving quality of life … there are elements of our “civilized” culture that ought to be struck down if we are to prevail as a unified and happy species, and technological supremacy does not lighten the blame on our conventions. Likewise, it does not make the potentially negative aspects of cultures in economically inferior regions more severe than our own Western failings. There is no single image of a Utopic civilization, no one “civilized” manner in which to proceed.
Making farming easier is a good thing … but it will not necessarily shrink populations. It will bring food, a vastly absent luxury in this overstuffed world, to many. This is good. But population needs to be controlled around the world. The problems may be more pronounced in developing nations, but as we are not struggling as often to survive, we can afford to dip our population growth even further than it is now. It certainly should not rise significantly above replacement level. Population grows exponentially, but crops don’t. Somehow we figure that, as a notion and as a world, hacking at and over-developing thousands of acres of cropland and essential ecosystems is worthwhile even as our population is exploding. Wake up. We need to shrink and consolidate, or shrink a lot more.
An important part of sustainable development is eliminating impersonal, corporate interference and brining production and innovation down to a local, pragmatic level. Inexpensive, innovative, quality products are a good step in this direction. We need to get away from commercialism and into pragmatic economic expansion, in which human needs are met, not consumer needs created.
7. Jon | 07.25.08
P.S. I appreciate your comment, Felipe, that “education is crucial, but it does not have to be shaped by our own patterns.”
A monotone world, in education, in cultural development, in technological development, in economic development … is both a dangerous and uninteresting world.
8. Au Barrameda | 07.25.08
I agree that Africa needs to have a more established educational system to empower its people. I also agree that tribalism, which is still dominant in that part of the globe, should be gently suppressed (sorry, i can’t find a euphemism) if Africa has to have more unity.
I have to disagree, however, with some of what Mr. Lewis and Mr. James said. I believe things such as Fisher’s invention will enable people to meet their most basic needs and should therefore be simultaneously present with–and not be taken care after–efforts to develop the educational system.
Also, I don’t think “civilization” should be equated with “suppression of tribalism”–because tribalism is a kind of civilization and thus falls under the civilization umbrella. And civilization advances from one stage to another through education.
9. john | 07.25.08
i thought the water did not belong to us…how can we use something that belongs to “mother earth”?
10. Gary Bartholomew | 07.28.08
Are detailed plans available for construction of these pumps? Can the pumps be purchased? We need some specifications, such as: how deep will they pump from, etc. Thanks!
11. Gertrude Rodriguez | 08.07.08
I have read a little bit about the moneymaking water pump. I am interested in knowing more about the particulars of the pump and the feasibility for use in Africa and where can one get it. A friend of mine visited another friend in Africa and they need a water pump. They already have a small hole in the ground. That is the way they bring water up but is time consuming and labor intensive, a manual water pump will help a lot.
Thanks,
Gertrude
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1. Lewis | 07.23.08
While I applaud Mr. Fisher’s hard work in his field (pun intended) these are not the type of solutions that are needed. What is needed is a change in culture where education is more valued (especially for women) family planning is encouraged and tibalism is supressed (gently). By not actively changing their culture so they stop having so many children such inventions just delay an inevitable collapse and may make it worse by having a larger population that suffers.