The Association for Humanitarian Development (AHD), a Hyderabad-based community organisation, has been awarded US$320,000 for a biological water-filtering initiative that provides hundreds of thousands of families with clean water.
The Pakistani group is one of four worldwide groups to have won a share of the 2017 Healthcare Innovation Award, funded by global healthcare company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The water purification initiative was highlighted at a roundtable discussion with stakeholders and policymakers. The discussion covered the challenge of providing safe drinking water, how AHD’s innovation could be scaled to reach more people and the potential for it to spur other innovative health initiatives in Pakistan.
Currently, many rural communities in Pakistan have to drink contaminated water. Children under five are especially vulnerable as contaminated drinking water was a major factor in diarrhoeal deaths and several neglected tropical diseases, including intestinal worms, schistosomiasis and trachoma. Recent rapid urbanisation, susceptibility to floods and the challenging terrain of Pakistan has made accessing safe water extremely difficult for the lower quintile of the population.
To expand access to safe water, AHD introduced a simple and replicable bio-sand water filter, known as a “Nadi” filter, to hundreds of vulnerable villages. The innovation removes 98 to 100 per cent of biological contamination and can reduce diarrheal diseases by up to 40 per cent.
The filter is sourced and constructed from locally available materials, meaning that one unit, which serves a household of eight to ten people, costs just Rs1,000-1,500. AHD also provides training to local staff and communities to enable them to take ownership of the innovation by constructing and repairing their own filters. Since launching in 2007, the Nadi Filter has provided clean and safe drinking water to 400,000 households.
The Healthcare Innovation Award is a key initiative from GSK, which aims to reward sustainable and scalable healthcare innovations that have resulted in tangible improvements to under-five child survival rates.
