After witnessing the daily struggle for clean drinking water in developing nations in the 1980s, Dr. David Manz was determined to design a water purifier that would be effective and inexpensively built and operated. His University of Calgary students' solution was basically a garbage can with a faucet at the bottom. Building on this idea, Manz developed the Biosand Water Filter (BSF) which may be the most positive single invention affecting the health of people living in disadvantaged communities throughout the world. Most of the BSFs have been installed for use by individual families, although they are often shared with extended family members, friends and neighbours. Dr. Manz has also trained individuals and organizations to properly apply the BSF technology, mostly in support of humanitarian projects. This knowledge has been passed on to others, and over the past decade, hundreds of BSF projects have been established.
Barriers/Challenges To Success
Dr. Manz has faced two primary challenges throughout the development and proliferation of his BSF technology: access to funding and the need for third-party, independent validation. Particularly in its initial stages, Dr. Manz had to personally fund the promotion, training, and travel associated with implementing the BSF technology, forcing him to scale back many of his initial plans (and putting him into debt).
Furthermore, although the organizations that were involved with the early installations of the technology could see that it was improving the health of the communities in which it was installed, Dr. Manz was lacking official third-party, independent validation. In 2004, however, his technology got the validation it needed when various non-profit organizations (including Samaritan's Purse, the Rotary Club of Michigan, and The Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology) joined forces to commission a study. They hired Dr. Mark Sobsey, a professor with the University of North Carolina, to lead the research. Dr. Sobsey studied the BSFs that had been implemented in the Dominican Republic. He concluded that it had been responsible for a 61% decrease of water-related diarrhea, as well as finding that the BSFs were still being properly used by 90% of the people to whom they had been given two years ago.
Dr. Sobsey also studied the BSFs that had been installed in Cambodia by Samaritan's Purse. There he found a dramatic decrease in water-related diarrhea and a 95% reduction of water-bourne e.coli.
As a result of the third-party validations, the use of Dr. Manz' BSF technology has exploded throughout the world. Results of Dr. Sobsey's studies--and of other independent researchers--have been or will be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Dr. Manz travels continously to share his expertise with humanitarian users, as well as to support his commercial users.
Contact
Dr. David Manz, P.Eng, P.Ag.
Engineer, Independent Consultant
