It was one the assignments for my course where I need to write about a social problem and give a profitable business solution to it. I started to think about ways to solve drinking water problem but when I did little bit of research I found less than 5% percent of fresh water is used for drinking. Rest ? read below...
Effective solution to water crisis
According to a study around 1 billion people in the world does not have access to safe drinking water. UN in one of the millennium development goals has clearly stated “Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation”. The improvement in the agriculture and manufacturing industries over the last decade has not only increased the demand for water but at the same time polluted the water sources. The fastest developing countries like China and India also face water shortages due to constant increase in their populations. Even though there were few countries who have taken this initiative seriously lack of action by other countries makes this problem persistent. Though the UN, World Bank and other organizations are doing lots of developmental projects to get people access to water there is a tremendous opportunity for social entrepreneurs to invest and build models to make access to water to the people. When we look at the use of fresh water major chunk of it is used for irrigation. So if we effectively manage the supply of fresh water we can reduce the water problem to quite a bit. In most of the developing countries agriculture is one of the main occupation and most of the methods used for irrigation are ancient where the wastage of water is more and most of it are lost due to evaporation and leakages. There are countries like Israel which have effectively save water using technologies such as drip irrigation. It is a technology by which drippers emit the water directly to the soil adjacent to the root system, which absorbs the water immediately, evaporation is minimal with peak water utilization rate almost 95%.This reduces the hassle of watering the plants on day to day basis and one time installation It been absorbed the crop yields have increased or remained the same when this technology is used. Apart from that it minimizes soil erosion and reduces the cost of labor employed. The only problem in implementing this technology is the high initial cost which is one of the basic reasons that this technology hasn’t found any takers in developing countries. If the above technology was replicated in Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia water resources there can be managed effectively. This gap can be filled up by social entrepreneurs who can set up shops in developing countries and help low income farmers to get access to drippers in their field ,they can also transfer the know how technology on how to use these drippers. One way of providing drippers to the farmers is by giving loans and so that they have the access to the drippers. Another way is by forming a partnership with the farmers and gets a percentage share of the yield once the crop is harvested or they can involve the local communities to develop a funding strategy. One has to make sure the farmers are being able to install the drippers and make sure they are using it in the right way,
The excess water which has been saved can be used for drinking and various other useful purposes. Though privatization of water resources may have some negative impact among the people as most of them think access to water as a right, we can overcome this problem by having a proper dialogue with the community and make sure the project which is implemented would be beneficial for society.
Thus the social entrepreneurs have more scope than the governments to meet the needs of people and provide on a sustainable basis the resources needed to address the huge social problems such as the water crisis.
