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The inspiration behind Wello and the WaterWheel
came from my experience living in Mexico
and Guatemala where I would have to walk to collect my own water
which meant getting up really early before the sun got too hot
and trying to carry a five-gallon bucket home and never really succeeding.
So I usually ended up spilling half of it on the walk home
and it is incredibly difficult.
When I came across other water transportation tools,
I was immediately blown away by the applicability
for one in six billion people on the planet,
but I was also surprised by the fact
that I never saw these tools in use anywhere.
Wello is a social venture that manufactures
and distributes the water transportation tool called the WaterWheel.
WaterWheel is a 20-gallon drum
that moves five times the amount of water
possible using traditional methods.
So it has a potential of a huge impact on the lives of women
and girls in particular developing countries.
They are the primary water carriers for their families
and will transport five gallons of water at a time in containers like this.
Water is carried on the head and five gallons weighs 44 pounds.
So to give you an idea, this is like getting off an airplane in LaGuardia
putting your checked baggage on your head
and then walking to the Brooklyn Bridge every single day.
So you can imagine it is not only a huge physical burden that causes back pain
and can even lead to complications during childbirth
because it changes the curvature of your spine,
but it is also a huge time burden and keeps girls out of school
and prevents women from doing anything economically productive with their time.
Wello’s goal is to produce a product that’s high quality, inexpensive
and has the ability to be used by people all over the world.
We are using business solutions as a means of alleviating poverty.
The Wello team spent the summer of 2010
on the ground in Rajasthan, India, to learn about the market.
Is the WaterWheel that Indian people even wanted?
Were they interested in purchasing it, and how will they be using it?
So what we have found surprised us a little bit
because we found the market was so much bigger than we thought. ,
It is not a tool that’s only relevant for people who are living in rural areas
earn less than $2 a day, --
but we found that people in urban areas are also
they have challenges accessing, storing, and distributing water as well.
So we are excited to return to Rajasthan this fall and launch a large-scale pilot.
So we will be going back to Rajasthan this summer
and we are aiming to sell about 5,000 WaterWheels in our first year
which [inaudible] about 40,000 people.
In the US, we tend to think of the water crisis as an issue of water quality.
People don’t have safe drinking water and so it makes them sick.
But it is also an issue of quantity, reliability, and accessibility.
The UN recommends that people use five gallons per person per day
just to maintain a basic level of human health and immune function.
But most people living in developing countries
only have access to about one gallon per person per day.
And if you can imagine carrying all the water you use in a day on your head,
you can see why it is such a small amount.
What this means is that there are not only people
living with low levels of intestinal discomfort and disease,
kids aren’t learning as well as they can be in school.
People are tired, they are less economically productive.
Wello’s goal is to get the WaterWheel into the hands of as many people as possible
and one of the challenges that the people who needed the most are the least able to afford it.
So we have worked to reduce the price of the product as much as possible
and we are hoping to retail for between $20-30,
when we launch in India later this fall.
We have also developed what we call business-in-a-barrel model
that enables end users to actually run their own sustainable businesses using the WaterWheel
so they would be providing clean water door-to-door.
-That’s fantastic -Yeah
Yeah, it is a WaterWheel. It is a water transportation tool.
-Really? -Isn’t it neat?
So you could move water without logging it around?
Exactly.
Cool!
-Wow! That’s kind of useful. -Yeah.