AFKInsider: Many NGOs and other organization focus on building wells and breaking into sources of water. Why are point-of-use systems so important?

Williams: There are two separate issues. One is access to water. I’ve lived in a lot of villages in Africa where, typically women and girls, wake up in the morning and walk two or three kilometers to a river and fill up jerry cans. That’s their access. The water they bring home is then used for all types of things including drinking and that opens the question, ‘Is it safe to drink?’ NGOs facilitate access to water.

Now you have water. Is it going to transmit cholera or typhoid fever or all the other things prevalent in the environment and water sources?

Household water treatment is aimed at treating the water that comes into the house and improving its quality to make it safer to drink. A lot of NGO progress over the decades has been more focused on water accessibility and that’s fine, but maintenance of wells and maintenance of pumps is a big problem. That limits the impact of well drilling on water access.

In the end, once you have this access, you have to address quality. Unsafe water solves nothing, it just creates bigger issues.

AFKInsider: How does the HaloPure point-of-use system work?

Williams: Most people understand Brita filters. You pour water into the top, it seeps down through a cartridge that’s got some particles in it. If there’s a lot of chlorine in the water, it will take that out and make it taste better. If there are things in the water like contaminants, not infectious, but things like mercury and cadmium and industrial metals, it will take those out.

What HaloPure does is it adds to that experience of percolation, a really powerful disinfectant. In addition to the kinds of things that happen to water when you pour it through a Brita cartridge, we make cartridges with contact-biocide technology that provides a total killer of viruses and bacteria. We pack all that power into a tiny cartridge and to make it user convenient, you’ve got to be able to filter thousands of litres of water. In India, a typical household cartridge can last seven or eight months.

AFKInsider: So, if an individual gathered water from a cloudy, maybe polluted lake, will one of these systems will make it perfectly suitable for them to drink?

Williams: Yes. We’ve done a lot of work of purification of pretty bad water in our testing. India probably has the worst water in the world. Even in big cities, it isn’t safe to drink the water there. So, households treat murky, polluted water, especially during monsoon season where sediment is lifted. We’ve had a lot of experience in taking dirty water and put it through a single pass and make it safe to drink.

AFKInsider: What type of projects is HaloPure a part of in Africa and globally?

Williams: We make a whole range of products now that address water safety. We make them in China, India, and they’re increasingly getting into household water treatment devices in Asia in particular. We’ve got a nice relationship going with the group in Malawi. We’ve introduced some of the devices that depend on our technology and they’re on test there.  We also brought gravity feed purification systems to Tanzania.

AFKInsider: How do you make a decision on where you send your technology?

Williams: In terms of Tanzania, we’ve got a partner company in India that actually makes the devices. We make the intel inside, the cartridge that makes it work as a disinfecting household water treatment. So what we did there was, I happened to have good contacts in the Tanzanian Ministry of Health, and we provided some units so we could get some hands-on African response to the devices.

There are lots of aspects of using the device in households that are culturally related and we had no experience at all in how African users would respond to something that is already broad spread in India. It didn’t really go anywhere. We don’t have a distribution system there. It was more to get a reading on how the device would go over among Tanzanian villagers. The larger scale process in Arica, we started last year. We have, with Barefoot Mile in northern Malawi; we have about three hundred household units on test. They’ve been on test for about six months now. We are at the phase where we are going to send people out there to evaluate and get questionnaire type reactions on how easy the product is to use and so on. At the moment, our most serious venture is in northern Malawi.

AFKInsider: What do you think of the feasibility of this technology being used on the continent?

Williams: Part of it is almost always economics. The devices that are in the market- take for example India. India is the country that has the most household water treatment devices in place. Outside of India, Unilever and a couple of other countries are just getting into distribution with a focus on South America. To my knowledge, Unilever is not in Africa at the moment. Overall, the price point is not a trivial one. This device and the devices out technology goes into is about $40. That’s a lot in an African environment.

That doesn’t mean there is not emerging middle class communities that would be appropriate as a target market, but if you really want to get it to the masses, you have to get the price down significantly. It may not be that the device that we have and the technology that’s in place there is appropriate. I think there are potentially other ways to go if you want to have an impact on the lower layers of the economic pyramid and rural communities. Different technologies will have to be adopted and/or adapted.