How we work
To break the cycle of poverty in Africa, access to clean water for drinking, water for irrigation, toilets with hygiene and nutritional education must be improved. Using simple but effective technology, Pump Aid builds water pumps, called Elephant Pumps, that can be maintained by poor rural communities without any assistance.
Pumps are built in response to grassroots demand and in full consultation with the local community. The local community come together to assist in the building process, providing materials such as bricks, sand, stones and unskilled labour.
The Elephant Pump can also supply water for irrigating nutrition gardens where communities can grow crops to improve their diet and even grown surplus crops to sell to bring much needed cash into the household.
The recent addition to Pump Aid's work is the Elephant Toilet. The toilets use just one bag of cement in their construction along with cast-off materials such as ball point pens and plastic bottles. A naturally occurring local plant with antiseptic properties is grown outside each toilet and users pick a leaf to use as soap to wash their hands with after every visit.
