Bridging the Clean Water Gap in Africa: WaterKiosk Africa’s Renewable Energy Solution
The scarcity of clean water remains one of the biggest challenges in communities across Africa. The challenge becomes dire when institutions like hospitals are unable to carry out their operations effectively due to lack of clean water. To bridge this gap, WaterKiosk Africa has been engaging in renewable energy solutions for water treatment facilities. The company installs, operates, and maintains solar water desalination systems for off-grid communities around Africa.
According to WaterKiosk Africa co-founder Samuel Kinyanjui, the company ensures inclusivity in its model of operation, ensuring impact-oriented results, engaging community stakeholders, and promoting women as kiosk operators. “Our project installations cut across Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Somali, Somaliland, Botswana, and Senegal,” says Mr. Kinyanjui.
WaterKiosk Africa also runs an Academy, the WaterKiosk Academy, aiming to train different categories of people, including operators, users, and owners. The training covers basic technology and detailed emphasis on our Solar Desalination System and technology.
So far, Waterkiosk has managed to provide safe and clean water to 30 hospitals with a daily production capacity of 1,000,000 litres, benefiting six million people annually. This has enabled the company to create direct jobs for 55 people and 150 indirectly.
Mr. Kinyanjui notes that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for clean hygiene water emerged as one of the critical needs for hospitals, prompting the company to prioritize these institutions more. “The pandemic well demonstrated the critical role hygiene water plays in people’s lives and the safe operation in the health sector. As an emergency response, a solar water desalination project was implemented, to mitigate the impact of the pandemic by supplying over one million litres of hygiene drinking water daily, in 30 key hospitals across East Africa,” he notes.
In addition to ensuring full sustainability and reliability to the beneficiary hospitals with the advantage of having solar-powered systems, ensuring minimal running costs, including staff, costs, repairs, and maintenance. “Further to the system installation, an intensive training exercise was conducted for the operators on technical and management of this landmark project,” he adds.
The Solar Water desalination systems installed in the beneficiary hospitals vary between 20,000 litres per day to 100,000 litres per day. The project was under a donation program supported via the development program which DEG implements on behalf of the German Ministry of Economic Corporation and Developments (BMZ) and the Technology Partner, Boreal Light GmbH.
The treatment process starts by filtering contaminated resources, removing 99 percentage of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) to produce clean water, devoid of organic/inorganic contaminants, bacteria, and viruses, all powered directly powered by Solar energy without expensive battery storage. Designed as an independent, low-maintenance, off-grid system, the desalination system operates without diesel generators or grid connections, using DC electricity from solar panels. A small solar array suffices for its power needs, making it ideal for areas lacking clean water access. The installed systems are monitored remotely, ensuring optimal system performance.
“We ensure the content of minerals and the pH in water is according to the standards placed by the World Health Organisation and Kenya Standards Act,” he adds. Identification of the facility that needs water is dependent on several factors that include the need for clean hygiene water, a facility with a bed capacity of 25 and above, and one with an existing saline borehole.
Mr. Kinyanjui notes that currently the company has covered Kenya and Tanzania with respect to the hospital Solar water desalination project, and dispensing over one million litres of clean hygiene per day. “We are looking at expanding and dispensing over 10 million litres per day of hygiene clean water, covering the continent of Africa with similar replications as a target,” adds Mr. Kinyanjui.
He adds that as the company expands in Kenya, they look forward to having more impact and footprint in Africa with a focus on to the Solar Water Desalination project for drinking water, irrigation water, and sanitation water. “The bigger future is to pursue the possibility of getting more Social-impact partners as well as commercial partners to increase the clean water access, not only to the hospitals but the entire selected Counties in Kenya and not only on clean water supply but also on solar power supply for the hospitals and institutions. Thereby making residents and institutions in these selected Counties, water and power independent, impacting more people, more people trained, and more beneficiaries of clean water and solar power,” he adds.
