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Water treatment plants in Africa?

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DCal430

Diamond Member
Everyday in Africa 5 to 10 thousand people most of whom are children die from disease due to drinking contaminated water. Something needs to be done about this. I don't understand why the west can't do something to stop this problem, the developed nations do not have this problem, so why should the people of Africa. Why can't a water treatment facilities be built all over Africa to treat drinking water before consumption? There could be small local or regional water treatment centers all over Africa that delivers water to the people that is safe to drink.
 
invest all that money into something that provides no return on investment? That doesnt sound very capitalist to me
 
It's easy to sit and back and say others should do something to help out, have you done anything to help?
 
Just like everything, this is a far more complex issue than just water treatment.

Say they had all the fresh, clean water they could drink. Instantly, there'd be a huge strain on food supply.

How do we fix that, then?

I'm not saying it's not a problem - just that the solution is a LOT heftier than drinking water.
 
Water treatment plants require reliable power and, for chlorination, a reliable supply chain. This requires good roads, power plants, and political stability. So to get to clean water you need a complete iindustrial infrastructure.

In the US, we've spent trillions (with a t) on clean water infrastructure. While I believe the investment has been worht it, clean water doesn't come cheap and requires constant vigilance and an endless stream of money to maintain.

In parts of Africa there is a chicken and egg problem. Disease breeds poor economic performance and political instability which in turn breeds disease.

There is also the issue of priorities. I had a friend who lived in a small city (population ~30k) in Mexico. She was complaining that the water works kept shutting down and customers were only getting running water for a couple hours a day. This had been going on for months. I inquired if the system was old or the pipes busted or the wells were running dry or what the issue was. She said that the reason the water kept getting turned off was that the local electric utility kept cutting off power to the plant. So then I asked if it was a supply problem with insufficient capacity requiring rolling blackouts? No, the elctric utility cut the power because the water utility (city owned) wasn't paying its electric bills. The water utility wasn't paying its bills because the customers weren't paying their water bills. The city politicians wouldn't allow the water utility to cut customers off for failure to pay so large numbers of customers simply stopped paying and the sytem crashed causing problems for everybody. Political weakness killed the water system.
 
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DCal430 said:
The return is the lives of million of people a year most of who are children.
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which simply doesnt interest most investors. you dont get wealthy enough to make such investments by spending money on things which dont net you a profit

besides, we dont have enough money to save ourselves. we got kids dying from hunger every day right here in america. plus countless other problems.
 
depends on the country
some cases the govt leaders steal the money that should be used for these purposes
other countries are so poor there isn't enough money for the leaders to steal it before it can go for something useful like your water treatments
 
We-Are-The-World.jpg
 
FoBoT said:
depends on the country
some cases the govt leaders steal the money that should be used for these purposes
other countries are so poor there isn't enough money for the leaders to steal it before it can go for something useful like your water treatments
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Exactly. The OP is assuming that these countries have functioning bureaucracies and infrastructure to manage and operate these facilities, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

Unless you plan on occupying and taking over half the continent, it's very difficult to get help to the people who need it on a large scale.
 
How much water needs to be cleaned? Where is the power to drive the plants going to come from?

Minimum water flow for filtration plant?
 
Dude...it's Africa. No one cares beyond what "riches" they can rape out of the continent.
It's been that way for hundreds of years.
 
BoomerD said:
Dude...it's Africa. No one cares beyond what "riches" they can rape out of the continent.
It's been that way for hundreds of years.
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We are all Africans. Be it this day or the next. Their fate will be our own.

Throw in a higher population for us, and some instability. Starvation and bad water are so easily obtained.
 
Jaskalas said:
We are all Africans. Be it this day or the next. Their fate will be our own.

Throw in a higher population for us, and some instability. Starvation and bad water are so easily obtained.
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We may all be ancestors of Africans, but those that got out prospered, yet those that stayed didn't.
 
my ex-wifes family makes water filters in Kenya...

http://www.chujioceramics.com/

i have been to the workshop and it is a small scale operation but they make enough water filters to ship to several countries in Africa.

there isn't enough infrastructure for water treatment plants however. an example is the village where the above business is located (a suburb of Nairobi essentially) uses well water.
 
How about we move the people to where the fresh water is?

It's not like they haven't had 50,000 years to figure this out.

Sam Kinison after seeing commercials every year for those starving in Ethiopia, "The best thing we could do for those people is to send them two suitcases and a U-haul-it."
 
highland145 said:
http://www.samaritanspurse.org/giving/giftcatalog.html

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4423
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Ironwing summed it up...

Water treatment plants need: trained people, BEAUCOUP capital costs, BEAUCOUP operating costs.

To get the above, you need: schools/institutions to train the people, reliable taxation system to spread the cost out, a stable government to run all of the previous, a government that gives a shit and isn't corrupt as hell to make sure the previous get provided.

Also, you need to socialize people so that they know to avoid dirty water, and to have basic sanitation skills. The WHO has a blurb on this stuff, it's not just water treatment, it's also sanitation because people eat/shit/drink out of the same place, they don't have basic skills like "don't lick your hands after you wipe your ass and don't wash cause there are germs", they don't/can't shower regularly, have limited food safety training/enforcement, etc., etc.

And we haven't even talked about the infrastructure to get the water to the people...

If you want to help, see the links above. It's about ~$100 a pop to get household, point-of-use water filters into homes. They work a hell of a lot better than nothing, but I'd never drink from one - they do nothing for dissolved things (pesticides, chemicals) and little for heavy metals.
 
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