Water School is a Canadian non-profit organization that teaches appropriate water treatment technologies in developing countries. They are extremely effective because they focus on education, not on water technologies that require products, maintenance, or complex processed. The primary technology they use is called SODIS, or solar disinfection, which simply uses the UV light available from the sun to kill germs in drinking water, by putting bottles of water in the sun for a day before drinking.

 

One student led a series of SODIS workshops for WS’s Kenyan and Ugandan staff, training school teachers, health officers, and community leaders to build SODIS projects in their communities.

 

The student travelled all over the rural and urban areas of Kenya and Uganda to give these workshops, since WS’s staff are quite widely distributed. He visited many sites where whole communities have been completely transformed by WS’s projects, and they were joined by a documentary team who recorded people’s amazing stories.

Shortly after he returned to Canada, they received word that the local health clinics in some of the areas he had worked with Water School had collected health data before and after WS’s projects. They found that waterborne disease decreased by25 - 67%, and as a result, school attendance increased by 17-25%.
This provided a very satisfying conclusion to the trip.