Top News

Doing Good, Improving Wells

McIntire student helps create sustainable water filter business in arid region of Africa

	Matt Kinn (second from left) with Brooke Yamakoshi and villagers in Cameroon.

How can a simple compound of flour and clay save thousands of lives? Answer: If it’s baked into a ceramic water filter.

It was precisely this transformation that Matt Kinn (McIntire ’08) spent the better part of May working to facilitate in the arid far north of the Republic of Cameroon. (Cameroon is located on the central west coast of Africa, to the South of Nigeria, Chad, and the Central African Republic.) “The water quality there,” Kinn says, “is abysmal. Diarrhea takes an enormous toll, many people suffer from malaria, and nobody can get better, of course, without clean water.” Kinn notes that before using the local water, Peace Corps volunteers in the area first boil it, then filter it, then treat it with bleach—and many still get sick.

Interdisciplinary Effort
Kinn’s water works were part of a joint effort spearheaded by Brooke Yamakoshi (Engineering ’06, M.S. in Engineering ’10), who adapted an existing water filter design so that it could be constructed out of local clay. “Instead of using materials that would typically be used in the West,” Kinn says, “Brooke wanted to figure out how to use local resources so the technology would be sustainable.” Yamakoshi is currently writing her master’s thesis on how Third World countries adopt new technologies.

So while Yamakoshi took care of the engineering end of the project, Kinn’s job was to work out its somewhat dicey economics. “My goal was to figure out how much it would cost to make the filters and how we would get the inputs to make them. I also had to figure out what the costs would be for producing the filters themselves, as well as how much to sell them for.” (The filters would be used to serve about 50,000 people in 12 different villages in the region.) Another tricky issue, Kinn says, was figuring out how long the kilns should burn for. “Burning the kiln requires wood,” Kinn says, “and there wasn’t too much of it around.”

Kinn points out that water, too, is extremely scarce in the region. “There are real challenges associated with water supply, in terms of both quality and quantity,” he says, noting that villagers might have to dig 25 meters before even reaching water. “Our goal wasn’t to make money, but to turn the operation over to local villagers, who could use its proceeds to build more wells.”

Lessons in Life
One thing his time in Cameroon taught him, Kinn says, is that things don’t always go as smoothly as you expect them to. “I got there with a calendar of deadlines,” he says, “but I only met about half of them.” One unanticipated problem, for instance, was the start of the rainy season, which began about a week before the end of his visit. Says Kinn, “It made it pretty hard to collect clay.”

Still, Kinn and Yamakoshi made considerable progress during their relatively brief time in Africa. “When we left, we’d lined up suppliers, a potter who knew the design, and a clay source. We’d also almost perfected the process of burning the clay properly in the kiln.” The kilns, Kinn explains, had to fire at a consistent 900F—no small challenge, given that they were wood-powered. In the end, Kinn and Yamakoshi were able to turn the project over to the inter-village council responsible for the regional water supply. “We showed them how to run the business and how much cash and inventory to keep on hand,” Kinn says.

To Be Continued …
Kinn, who says he’s long been interested in Third World development projects (one of his heroes is Nobel Prize winner and micro-credit pioneer Muhammad Yunus), says his work in Africa is just the start of what he hopes will be a lifetime of work in sustainable development. “I’ve always wanted to take an alternate route,” he says, “and to use my finance skills not just for myself, but to help out other people.”

Step one along that route will be a stint as an investment banker in New York, in UBS’s power and utilities group. (When his time in Cameroon ended last summer, Kinn flew directly to New York to begin an internship at the bank. “It was a pretty big culture shock,” he says.) “I’d like to take the skills I’ll have gained from banking and from McIntire and use them for sustainable development projects,” Kinn says. He points out that his time at UBS will give him exposure to businesses working on renewable energy sources, another cause in which he’s keenly interested.

Kinn believes that skills in business and finance are crucial to really effecting change. “It’s great to have big ideas and to be passionate about them,” he says. “But if you don’t have the business skills to support those ideas, your projects will ultimately falter.”
 

Return to Exchange Home