The Rolling Invention - Wells on Wheels

THE CONCEPT

Whilst wells in rural India are now more accessible than they were 20 years ago, it is still not unusual to see women carrying water in a metal pail balanced on their heads.

Children, too, are tasked with walking in heat of up to 40 °C to fetch water in this way – sometimes they are as young as seven years old.

These typical water-carrying methods, however, bring with them physical loading that has the potential to cause injury, lead to musculoskeletal disorders, such as neck or back pain, and risk disability.

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INSPIRED

…by the simple office water cooler bottle that is delivered in the thousands every day throughout the UK. As a designer and problem solver, looking at this bottle on our water cooler got me thinking. Surely, large amounts of water could be rolled instead of loaded on the head?

Also I can’t possibly be the first person to have thought of this…

Discovering Cynthia

Whilst researching , I came across an incredible lady by the name of Cynthia Koenig, founder of Wello. Cynthia and her team had already designed the Water Wheel which has been vetted through a series of design validation pilots that took place across India over the course of 2 years. Her team lived and worked in dozens of villages, carried hundreds of litres of water and engaged with thousands of potential end-users and sector experts.

Cynthia is a firm believer in the potential for business to alleviate poverty. Her career has focused on incubating mission-based businesses designed to alleviate poverty in the developing world. She has helped launch ventures of all shapes and sizes, ranging from community-run ecotourism businesses in Mexico and Guatemala to a national strategy for sustainable tourism development in Bhutan.

I too feel that businesses can work to help alleviate property and I wanted to start giving from my own company to this amazing cause.

Shaz Memon