In urban areas of the developing world, municipalities struggle to maintain safe water in large distribution networks. Water that is clean at the source becomes contaminated as it travels through intermittently pressurized and leaky pipelines, especially where there is inadequate sewage and drainage infrastructure. Both centralized and household-level approaches to water treatment have failed to provide safe water to low-income urban communities at scale. Intermittent water supplies will likely persist in low-income urban settings for the foreseeable future because of freshwater scarcity coupled with population growth.
The mission of Lotus Water is to develop, evaluate, and scale point-of-collection (POC) water disinfection strategies to improve global access to safe water.We focus on developing and evaluating water treatment technologies for urban water points that require minimal behavior change (e.g. automatic chlorination devices) and are affordable for low-income consumers. To date, our team has installed >150 automated chlorination devices that have provided clean water to over 10,000 people living in Dhaka low-income urban communities. Recently, we have expanded to testing POC disinfection in peri-urban Kenya. See more on the Technology page.