Yemen Observer: http://www.yobserver.com
Posted in:
News Varieties
Written By: Ali Marmaduke
Article Date: Jul 7, 2007 – 12:51:36 AM
Yemen’s only high-temperature kiln, built by GTZ to produce ceramic water filters and irrigation pots
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These days, political violence makes headlines more frequently than
development issues. America’s war in Iraq, Al Qaeda’s war
against…everyone, and ethnic cleansing in Sudan are hot topics in the
media and among the world’s leaders. But, in Yemen, drinking
water often poses the biggest threat to survival. Every day there are
5,000 deaths worldwide, mainly children under the age of five, due to
diarrhea caused by unsafe water, according to a 2006 World Health
Organization report. Diseases related to inadequate water sanitation
cause an estimated 80 percent of all sickness in the developing world.
In Yemen, only 21.5 percent of the rural population has access to safe
drinking water and only 19 percent have adequate water sanitation
facilities, according to a 2006 GTZ (German Technological Cooperation)
study. Infant and child mortality rates are 71 deaths per 1000
live births and 105 deaths per 1000 live births, respectively. Those
rates are higher in rural areas. The U.N.’s Millennium Development Goal
is to halve the number of people unable to reach or afford safe
drinking water by the year 2015. But achieving that goal would require
that at least 125,000 people be provided access to safe water supplies
each day before the 2015 target. The shortfall in the
availability of drinking and irrigation water in Yemen is primarily due
to overpopulation.
And the fact that an estimated 70 percent of the country’s water supply
is used irrigate Qat fields exacerbates the crisis. Although the Yemeni
government has still not implemented adequate measures to correct this
situation, international humanitarian organizations are working with
the Yemeni National Water Resource Authority to provide rural and urban
populations with the means to sanitize drinking water and to more
efficiently irrigate crops to conserve the country’s dwindling water
supply. According to the NWRA website, “The water situation
[in Yemen] is becoming progressively worse because of population growth
and increasing water demand.
The government is fully aware of the challenge this poses to the
country; therefore, it has given a very high priority to water
security.†The German government has been one of the main donors to the
improvement efforts of Yemen’s water sector. Other donors include the
World Bank and the Dutch government. The 21.5 percent of Yemen’s rural
population that has access to safe drinking water gained that access in
the last two decades, according to the GTZ website. In 2006, the
international NGO, Integrated Water Resource Management sent a team to
Yemen to work to determine what would be required to introduce two
low-tech products that would alleviate Yemen’s water crisis.
The first product was an unglazed indigenous clay pot (called ‘jarar’
in Arabic) that is buried neck deep underground and periodically filled
with water. When full, the pot saturates the surrounding soil with
water that is sucked through the porous clay when the ground is dry and
delivers water directly to the plant root zone. The water remains
inside the pot when the soil has reached its moisture capacity.
This method helps reduce the amount of water required for agriculture
by up to 70 percent. It also increases farmer incomes by
improving plant survival, increasing plant yields by up to 70 percent,
and increasing fruit and vegetable size.
However, the traditional clay pots produced in Yemen quickly
disintegrate and break with prolonged exposure to water because they
are not fired at temperatures high enough to alter the molecular
structure of the clay into durable ceramic. The second product that the
IWRM team is currently introducing to the Yemeni market is a water
filtration device that was developed in Guatemala in 1981 by the
Central American Industrial Research Institute and promoted by Potters
for Peace, a member of the World Health Organization’s International
Network to Promote Household Water Treatment and Safe Storage.
The device was created to be a low cost filter that could be fabricated
at the community level and provide potable water to the poorest of the
poor.
A diagram and photo of a silver filter, and the press used to mold them uniformly
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It is called a Colloidal Silver Impregnated Ceramic Water Filter. “I call them ‘silver filters’ for short, because I can’t come up with a better name,†said Rich Boni, an American independent contractor working with GTZ. Boni has lived in Yemen for nearly 11 years and he is well acquainted with Yemen’s water crisis. “One silver filter can provide a day’s worth of drinking water for a family
of six,†Boni said. “I know that kind of flies in the face of
reality here in Yemen because the average size of a Yemeni family is eight, but this is the largest size we make right now.â€
The silver filters are 10†deep and 11†wide buckets that resemble
flower pots. They are made from local clay. After being
fired in a kiln, the buckets are impregnated with a liquid colloidal
silver solution that acts as a bactericide. The bucket is placed inside
a receptacle, made of plastic or clay, and is filled with water.
That water filters through the bucket at a rate of 2-2.5 liters per
hour and rests in the receptacle until poured through a spigot and
consumed. “The flow rate of the filters has been tested
over and over to make sure that water remains within the ceramic long
enough to kill all the bacteria, but short enough to be convenient,â€
Boni said. Clinical test results in 11 countries have shown that silver
filters to eliminate 99.88 percent of water born disease agents.
Institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
USAID have participated in the testing of silver filters and have
officially confirmed their efficacy. Silver filters can be sold
for YR 2,200, require brief cleaning with a hard brush once a month,
last for up to two years, and can be produced by local potters using
local materials. However, GTZ’s and IWRM’s two-part solution to Yemen’s
water crisis had two requisites. The first requirement was
potters. Yemen has a tradition of clay production and plenty of
potters who use a traditional method of clay pot production. But it
quickly became evident that the crude gas-fired kilns used by these
potters were unsafe (two months ago a kiln exploded in Dhamar, killing
a child) and incapable of firing clay at a high enough temperature to
create ceramic pottery (traditional kilns only reach about 500 degrees
Celcius).
So the second requirement was an environmentally friendly gas-fired
kiln that was safe, could fire at high temperatures (up to 900 degrees
Celcius) and could be built entirely of local materials. German Dr.
Michael Klinger was a part of the IWRM team in charge of introducing
and promoting water conservation technology in Yemen. He
suggested that if the German government was going to fund the
GTZ-directed construction of a high temperature kiln for the production
of irrigation jarar, it would be prudent to begin producing silver
filters, which also require firing at high temperature.
His advice did not fall on deaf ears. About a year later, at
the Modern Pottery Workship, just outside of Sana’a on Wadi Dhahr Road,
the 120 cubic feet, propane-fueled high-temperature kiln was built and
a press was constructed, with the supervision of a representative of
Potters for Peace, to produce uniformly molded clay buckets for silver
filters. But, currently, there is only one high-heat kiln
and only one family of potters in the entire Republic of Yemen to
produce these ceramic products. Ali Saleh Sa’ad, 35, is
originally from al-Raima. His father was a potter.
His grandfather was a potter. His family has been potters
“since the time of the Prophet Mohammad,†he said, grinning
proudly. GTZ, Rich Boni, and Dr. Klingler of the IWRM team
formed a relationship with Sa’ad about a year ago. The Sa’ad
family owns and lives at the Modern Pottery Workshop and includes, Ali,
his wife, parents, brother, and his two cousins. The workshop is
constructed of corrugated sheet metal supported by wood beams and a
cinderblock foundation. Ali and his family went into debt to buy
the land and to contribute to the construction of the kiln.
Ali has been repaying that debt by making tannoors (small traditional
Yemeni clay ovens) for his debtors to sell. Each tannoor oven
sells for around YR 600, but GTZ and Rich Boni are hoping the Yemeni
market will be receptive to the jarars and silver filters that the
Modern Pottery Workshop is producing so Ali can focus on their
production and can make a more significant income. “I really want to be
associated with this project because I think it could change a lot of
people’s lives all over this country,†said Boni. “And I think
this is going to spread because we’re not working as a huge
bureaucratic organization that takes forever to do the smallest
things.
We just need to find an NGO that will go around the country and educate
people about how to uses these filters and how to clean them once a
month.†There has been some interest in the silver filters and jarars
around Yemen. Before the Modern Pottery Workshop began production
this year, 500 silver filters were imported from a Potters for Peace
workshop in Cambodia to the Shabwa Province with very good acceptance
among the recipients.
(CBS/AP)
