UN Water Conference: the entrepreneurs on a mission

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Laura Stocco, CTO & Co-founder, Openversum: The ripple effect that water has on life is major because it impacts your health, it impacts then your ability to go to work, to attend school. So your education, your opportunity to get out of poverty if you're stuck in poverty. It's a fundamental right and we tend to forget it when we have access to it on a daily basis.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week we’re at the UN Water Conference in New York, hearing from entrepreneurs determined to find ways to solve the huge challenges related to water.

Beth Koigi, Co-founder, Majik Water: Getting water from air has a huge potential because the amount of fresh water in the atmosphere is six times that of all rivers around the world.

Robin Pomeroy: From pulling water from the air in Kenya, to redesigning what we do with runoff from buildings in Canada.

Kevin Mercer, Kevin Mercer, President & Co-founder, RainGrid Inc: The path to clean water starts where the rain falls. We have built our cities trying to manage rainfall as waste water. It's time to change our perspective on rainfall to one of a circular economy of rain.

Robin Pomeroy: The UN Water Conference is the first of its kind for 50 years and has been compared to the Paris climate COP. But can it be more than blah blah? These entrepreneurs hope so.

Laura Stocco: The UN Waster Conference - you know, I think it's fantastic to see water having a stronger stage, but this needs to lead to something.

Robin Pomeroy: Subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts.

I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with the view from entrepreneurs attending the UN Water Summit.

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General: Water is in deep trouble.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos

And this is UN Secretary-General António Guterres opening the Water Conference in New York.

António Guterres: Water is humanity's lifeblood. From the food we eat to the ecosystems and biodiversity that enrich our world, to the prosperity that sustains nations, to the economic engines of agriculture, manufacturing and energy generation, to our health, hygiene and survival itself. Water is a human right and the common development denominator to shape a better future. But water is in deep trouble.

Robin Pomeroy: On today's Radio Davos, we're going to New York, where the UN Water Conference is under way. It's the first United Nations water conference in almost five decades, and they're trying to solve the problem of water. Do we have enough water? Is it safe? Is it equitable? There are billions of people who just can't access the water they need. So what is this conference all about? Well, joining us from New York right now is my colleague, Laura Beltran. Laura, how are you?

Laura Beltran, Digital Media Specialist, UpLink: I'm good, Robin. Thank you.

Robin Pomeroy: Delighted to have you here. How's New York looking today? What kind of time of day is the sun up yet?

Laura Beltran: I haven't looked outside but yes. It's 7 a.m. my time, so I guess, yes, the sun is out.

Robin Pomeroy: You're usually based in Geneva where I am now. But you've gone out to New York. Why have you gone there? What are you doing there?

Laura Beltran: Well, I'm part of the UpLink team supporting here the innovators from our community who are attending the UN Water Conference.

Robin Pomeroy: So you're part of the UpLink team. Regular listeners to Radio Davos will have heard of UpLink because we've featured them before. But just remind us what UpLink is. It's part of the World Economic Forum. But what does it do exactly?

Laura Beltran: Well, UpLink is the open innovation platform of the World Economic Forum. And by open, we mean that we welcome all entrepreneurs from around the globe addressing the world's most difficult challenges. So from plastics to energy to forests and now, of course, water. So what we do is we work with partners and multiple actors across different sectors to run challenges. And we identify the most promising solutions in specific areas. Then we connect the winners of these challenges to a whole network of people and organisations from the public sector, private sector, investors, and academia. So we build connections and bridges, bridges for them to help them scale.

Robin Pomeroy: And so you've got a number of UpLink innovators there with you in New York. Tell us about what you're doing with them in New York.

Laura Beltran: Yes. So we brought to this conference 14 Innovators as part of our Aquapreneur Innovation Initiative, which focuses, of course, on water. So we have entrepreneurs tackling the water scarcity and insecurity problems in very different ways from, for example, two of our innovators work in the sustainable desalination space, making pure drinking water from the ocean other solutions work in the nexus between water and food and food security, working with fishermen and farmers and other start-ups see wastewater as a resource.

Robin Pomeroy: Okay, so you've been talking to them yesterday. I know you I think you interviewed all of them and you spoke to all of them. And you're going to bring us just a selection here on this. I think three entrepreneurs we're going to talk about to give an idea of the kinds of things business people and entrepreneurs can do with new ideas to try and solve some of the water problems. So I'd like you to introduce the three people you've interviewed for us, and we're going to start, I believe, in Kenya, who's the entrepreneur from Kenya, who we're going to hear from now?

Laura Beltran: Her name is Beth Koigi. So she is an entrepreneur that founded Majik Water. It's a start-up that creates devices that use the atmosphere actually to create pure drinking water. So she's going to talk a lot about the situation of water in Kenya and why the atmosphere is ideal in regions with drought and water scarcity.

Robin Pomeroy: Let's hear from her.

Laura Beltran: Hi, Beth. So why don't you start by telling us about the situation of water in Kenya? What is it about your context that inspired you to create your solution?

Beth Koigi: Currently, the population of Kenya is 51 million, and 56% of that population do not have adequate access to clean drinking water. And actually, 80% of all the land mass in Kenya is arid or semi-arid regions. That means these are desert-like climatic conditions. And in the past few years we've been receiving less and less rainfall. That means that our natural water reservoirs have reduced in their levels, things like lakes and rivers have reduced in the water level, and this has impacted communities in a big way. When you have less water, you have more water contamination and that means you have more spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera. And actually when we are experiencing drought, we have more cholera outbreaks. We also experience economic challenges such as people do not do their farming. And these translate to food insecurity and many other challenges.

Laura Beltran: And have any of these challenges impacted you personally or somebody you know?

Beth Koigi: Water issues is not something very new to many Kenyans. Everybody has a story of, you know, the times they have gotten one or two waterborne diseases. Even for myself, I grew up getting Amoeba and you thought that is something that is normal, but it's not. And one of the fun facts about my co-founder, when she came to Kenya, she actually got cholera within the first one month. And these are cases that are quite rampant, and especially when we are facing the drought crisis.

So you find even most of the children below five years, they actually get waterborne diseases. And actually this is quite common. Like in a year you your child gets some water waterborne disease.

But over and above bacterial contamination and other microbial contaminants, we have a unique challenge where our water has very high levels of fluoride and arsenic. So all our groundwater has high levels of fluoride and arsenic. And actually you can't consume that water directly. So you either have to use reverse osmosis [water purification] and over time, because, you know, contamination is becoming more and more, it's becoming actually really hard to filter that groundwater.

Laura Beltran: So let's dive deeper into your solution because you untap one of the, let's say, largest resources on earth, the atmosphere. So why the atmosphere and what is the process you use to create the water from air?

Beth Koigi: Getting water from air has a huge potential because the amount of fresh water in the atmosphere is six times that of all rivers around the world in volume. So this is a huge water resource that can actually create drinkable water to communities in need.

That's why we started looking at air as a source of clean drinking water, and especially in places that experience physical water scarcity.

And the way Majik Water devices work, currently we are using condensation where we pass air through these fans. So air is pulled into the device through these huge fans, and then it's passed through the condensing chambers where the humidity is condensed into these water droplets and then we collect that. And then we have to pass that into the filtration system just to remove any micro-organisms that may have grown in the device. And this is just a quality measure in our regulation.

But currently all Majik Water devices use solar energy. So we do solar installations for our devices.

Laura Beltran: And how do you deploy these devices? Can you give the audience a sense of how much water they are able to produce?

Beth Koigi: So I'll start by - we have three types of devices. One is a 25 litres of water per day device and this is a household device. And then we have 120 litres per day device. This is for larger households. And then we have a 500 litres per day device and this is more like small community devices.

So most of our installations, we do installations mostly in schools and hospitals because we actually need to install the devices in a place where they are managed and they are owned. But mostly we work with local or international NGOs to do this installation.

So as an example, we have done an installation in one of the biggest slums in Africa, that is Kibera, where one of our 500 metre per day devices is being used by 650 students for their clean drinking water. We also do install small devices in households, but mostly our devices are being used for drinking.

So cumulatively, all our devices are producing over 200,000 litres of water per month. We have around 35 devices installed and we have around 1,900 beneficiaries in total.

The way our devices have impacted and what we have seen, especially in the present few months, is that when we have been experiencing drought, extreme drought conditions, a lot of people were left with no option. So most of the water vendors have actually limited the amount of water you can buy.

And it reached a point where in those regions that we have done installations, actually other people have been now, or the larger community, have been coming in to get water from these places. So these are cases that we've seen. The larger communities now are getting their drinking water from these institutions and these schools and these, we have seen, in the current drought situation that is happening in Kenya.

Laura Beltran: And now we're here in the middle of the UN Conference in New York, and people are recognising that water is a pressing issue and they're trying to find ways of solving this pressing challenge. So from your perspective, Beth, where should we start? How can we solve this water crisis?

Beth Koigi: I think the first thing first, it's water resource management. I think our rivers and lakes should be managed a bit more.

The thing that they can do immediately and very quickly is to manage these water resources that we have, manage them well, make sure they are not contaminated.

For example, the Nairobi River, that's where all of the industries in Nairobi throw their refuse water. So a lot of water that is from the industries that is polluted, that has not been recycled or properly treated, is put back into the Nairobi River, which is one of the biggest rivers. And this is one of the major causes of water scarcity. The rivers, the big rivers that we have, are highly contaminated. So drinking that water is actually very toxic.

Robin Pomeroy: So that was Beth Koigi from Kenya. Her company's Majik Water. Let's move all the way from Kenya to Canada to hear another UpLink innovator in water. Who's our next innovator, Laura?

Laura Beltran: Our next innovator is Kevin Mercer from Canada. His company is called Rain Grid, and he's building systems so property owners and large communities can capture rain to reuse it in our cities. So his idea is to make cities more water sustainable and water positive.

Laura Beltran: In most large cities, we use water as if it was an infinite resource, right? So we opened it up. We use the water, then we know it goes into the sewage, but we don't know what happens next. But you, Kevin, you talk a lot about green infrastructure and why it is so crucial for managing better the water resources in our cities, but also for protecting the world's freshwater ecosystems. What is green infrastructure and how is green grid fostering it?

Kevin Mercer: Green infrastructure or blue infrastructure or nature based solutions are relevant in urban centres because we get rain that lands largely on rooftops. So 70% of a city is hard surfaces. The majority of that is building rooftops and particularly residential rooftops, which is about 47% of the gross and permeable area in the city.

So this is the the area where if water lands on it, it runs off, tends to create a flash flood of hot, fast and dirty water that gets into the sewer system and then discharges into a local river or lake or or nearby marine ecosystem.

And what's important about it is that surface water pollution is the number one threat to freshwater ecosystems globally.

So when we take rooftops offline by harvesting the rain and reusing it or putting it back in the groundwater table, we are recharging the base ground flow that urban rivers no longer get because the city is so impervious. Or we recharge the ability of individuals to use rainwater in place of potable water, which is very energy intensive and hence has a high carbon footprint and a significant cost for people and cities as well.

Laura Beltran: And what was your dream? What was the vision you had for green infrastructure when you were coming up with the idea for your innovation?

Kevin Mercer: We wanted to see property-based retention and reuse systems as a network serving the needs of communities for the amelioration of urban runoff, which is often the number one source of pluvial flooding and the the source of runoff that that keeps groundwater from being recharged in cities.

Laura Beltran: Yes. And with climate change and all the things we're facing today or the challenges, these systems are just not fit for purpose. And you are tackling that issue with groundbreaking technology. So tell us, what is your technology and how is it so powerful for what we need today in our cities?

Kevin Mercer: Well, green infrastructure reached a certain level of acceptability, particularly cisterns on private property. And it was discovered that while people may put them in, they don't maintain them. And often in terms of stormwater capture and runoff prevention, if a cistern is full, it's not doing its job to prevent stormwater runoff.

So we were looking for something that would replace the community-based social marketing campaigns that we used to do, and artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things combined gave us that tool to take the responsibility for the maintenance of cisterns on private property out of the hands of the property owner.

So the artificial intelligence reads the regional weather forecast. It then correlates that to the roof area of the house and the volume of available storage in the cistern. And then when the predicted rainfall is on that area of roof is greater than the volume of available storage in the cistern, the AI and the IoT work together. So it's like the brain and the body, they work together.

So the sensors in the cistern open a valve on the cistern and it drains out that much water to the groundwater table recharge that we need to open up the area within the system to store the subsequent rainfall that's coming.

Our goal is net zero runoff from properties.

We've changed the whole notion of what it is to take rain off rooftops and retain it on a property as a network. We no longer see rain harvesting as 'I harvest this rain and I reuse it on my property for my own purposes', it's now a larger community version or vision of what we want cities to become.

And this is circular. So this is the circular economy of rain. And that whole notion of installing infrastructure, or nature-based solution, or a combination of those two, where the outcome is the resilience of the property, the resilience of the community, and the resilience of the larger city and ecosystem.

Laura Beltran: What economic benefits would bring using your technology in our cities? Why does it make business sense?

Kevin Mercer: Aggregated RainGrid Outcome Networks are built to monetise the value in what has previously been a wastewater resource, which is rainfall runoff - by capturing it for retention and reuse, we can monetise the outcomes that have been allowed to go squandered.

Stormwater retention credits. Ecosystem restoration credits. We can take scope two GHG credits off, so every time we retain water and reuse it or recharge the aquifer with it, we're generating value in terms of market outcomes that we haven't, to this point in the practice of cities, taken the opportunity to to recognise.

And that we're seeing cities move towards the achievement of building infrastructure networks on private property because they can be installed, operated and maintained at a lower unit cost and at a greater outcome than conventional centralised infrastructure.

So, the future is distributed. The future is collaborative.

Laura Beltran: The future is collaborative. Now, on that note, you're here in New York as part of the UpLink delegation of aquapreneurs attending the UN Water Conference. So what is the main message you like leaders to take from this conference?

Kevin Mercer: The path to clean water starts where the rain falls, is the most important message I can give.

We have built our cities. We have expended very huge sums of money trying to manage rainfall as wastewater. It's time to change our perspective on rainfall to one of a circular economy of rain that finds the value for the individual property owners and for the community at large, of not wasting water not creating polluted runoff, and of restructuring our cities so that we create a circular economy of the most precious resource we have.

Robin Pomeroy: Kevin Mercer, the president and co-founder of RainGrid Inc in Canada. I mean, just those two interviews, Laura, show us, you know, kind of completely different problems facing us across the world.

And our third one, we're going to go to Latin America via Switzerland, because I believe the company is Swiss but works at the moment mostly in Latin America. And we're back looking at dangerous, poisoned, toxic water and how that problem can be tackled. Tell us about this entrepreneur.

Laura Beltran: Yes, so Laura Stocco is CTO and co-founder of Openversum. This is a Swiss start-up. And their technology is a filtration system that brings water security for people in Latin America, but also empowers them to become entrepreneurs through a sort of micro franchising business model. So it's very interesting.

Robin Pomeroy: Let's hear from Laura Stocco.

Laura Stocco: I think the biggest misunderstanding about water is the actual impact that not having it creates and the impact that, let's say, the ripple effect that having it creates.

When we have access to safe water and we don't have to question it, we tend to forget that the only replacement to water is water. There is simply no other solution.

And the ripple effect that water has on life is major because it impacts your health. It impacts then your ability to go to work, to attend school. So your education, your opportunity to get out of poverty if you're stuck in poverty. And that's really it's a fundamental right that we have that is in the fundamental human rights. And we tend to forget it when we have access to it on a daily basis.

Laura Beltran: In your target rural communities in Latin America, these are hard to reach communities. How do you get to them? What is the technology you use?

Laura Stocco: We're addressing the lack of access to safe drinking water, mostly in rural areas in Latin America and across the entire globe.

So we created the drinking water filter that is equipped with a membrane that is undergoing a patented manufacturing process. So to create that membrane, we don't need to use all of the toxic chemicals that are typically used in a membrane manufacturing, which allows it to make it very cheap and efficient.

So through that, we created this drinking water filter that combines different layers of removal, that helps remove not only pathogens but also heavy metals and pesticides.

But this filter comes at a very low cost for very, very high efficiency, and that makes it available for populations who, right now, cannot access such technology.

Laura Beltran: What I find fascinating about your solution is that you also create entrepreneurs in rural areas through this micro franchising business model you have. Can you speak a little bit about that? How did this idea of turning people in rural areas into entrepreneurs come to be?

Laura Stocco: We're a team of engineers and so we develop many technologies. You know, that's our job. But we realised there are so many water treatment technologies that exist today and the problem is still there. So there's an issue. Technology is simply not sufficient.

So we looked at what are the hurdles to implementation.

And a major one that I've actually noticed in the field a lot is a lack of local expertise. You don't have anyone who's been trained to repair those technologies to maintain them, and they end up being misused or just unused. And then you're back to the state you were in before.

So we realised that by creating ownership of the products in the beneficiaries, so the people buying the filter, but also in the person having to maintain it, we can ensure a sustainable solution because it's to the benefit of everybody for this to be maintained, economically, and health-wise.

I think our greatest asset actually of the micro franchise is our scalability because we digitalise every micro franchising process on a digital platform that our entrepreneurs can use. They can record the sales, they can track their impact and monitor it.

But most importantly, it's a big capacity-building tool and a big network. So our entrepreneurs are just put in touch with each other. They get access to water knowledge, business knowledge and basically we foster entrepreneurship in our communities.

And because we don't have to be physically present and our local entrepreneurs know better than anyone how to reach their own local communities, we can expand really fast and grow big.

Because there's 2 billion people who lack access to safe drinking water. We're starting in Latin America, but then we have to move to Africa, to Southeast Asia, where millions are waiting.

Laura Beltran: I'm sure you have many positive stories to share, but is there one in particular that makes you proud that shows how your technology is making a positive change in the lives and livelihoods of these communities?

Laura Stocco: We met that woman, Maria, in Colombia. And it was quite emotional.

We went to households and we did these water quality tests together with the households so women could test the water quality of the water they were giving to their children and then see whether they were contaminated with E.coli.

And when the results came back and they saw that it was, Maria, she she cried. She cried so much because she said, I can't believe I'm giving this to my children and I don't have another choice.

She does her best. You know they have to go fetch the water at the river next door. And then they saw it in containers, hoping that it will get better.

And having our filter, she's now safe, her children are safe. And that's the kind of story that really moves me. And our entrepreneurs in Ecuador actually asked us very quickly, 'Can you give us some other products that we could micro franchise? It's a great way to empower communities. We want more.' And yes, that's very inspiring.

Laura Beltran: And you're attending the UN Water Conference as part of the UpLink delegation of aquapreneurs. What do you think should be a priority for all the stakeholders today?

Laura Stocco: I think a priority should be fostering partnerships that actually take action.

Because we see a lot of movement right now, it's always the UN Water Conference. I think it's fantastic to see water having a stronger stage right now, but this needs to lead to something.

And even though water can be a local issue, it's at a global scale. If it makes sense, it's 'globally local'.

I think something that's very important is to find these localised solutions that can be globalised, because water is a global issue, but it's going to be so different depending on where you are and who you are and which access to water you have, which technologies are available in the country.

So I think it really comes to everybody coming together, investing in those, maybe, what can look like niche innovation or very local solutions, to scale them up.

Robin Pomeroy: Laura Stocco, the co-founder of Openversum. Based in Switzerland, but working there in Latin America.

Really interesting the point she makes that the technology is there, a water filter, there are lots of different ways we can filter water, but the very important thing that she's emphasising there is getting local people involved in the distribution, the marketing, the selling of these products.

Laura Beltran: That's correct. And all entrepreneurs need support. They need a network, a community, where people from all different backgrounds and all different sectors can come together and help them scale.

Because the solutions are there, as Laura said, the solutions are there, we just need support to make them scale and have a true impact in different parts of the world.

Robin Pomeroy: I guess this goes to the heart of some of what UpLink does, it's about the business aspect, that people are being entrepreneurs, they're making money from these solutions, but they're tackling these big problems.

Laura Beltran: So we brought them here really, because we find true value in these connections that we can make for them. So we actually have run some sessions where they meet each other, but also different stakeholders to find points of collaboration and commonalities.

And it's really good that we have this power of putting them in connection with each other to help them scale, because that's what they need. They need a support system from very different backgrounds that can help them scale their solutions and reach more people in need.

Robin Pomeroy: Great. Okay. Well, Laura, thanks so much for joining us today all the way from New York very early in the morning where you are. Where can people find out more about UpLink?

Laura Beltran: We have a digital platform so people can go online to uplink.weforum.org and find more about us there. Just google UpLink. You'll find all about us. And you can also go on social media @wefuplink.

Robin Pomeroy: And if you want to hear more podcasts about the water crisis or other major problems that we're trying to find solutions to, look for Radio Davos. You can google that or you can go to wef.ch/podcasts. They're all on there. As is Meet the Leader, which also has a couple of great episodes about water this week,

Laura Beltran in New York, thanks very much for joining us.

Laura Beltran: Thank you Robin.

Robin Pomeroy: Please subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts and please leave us a rating or review. And join the conversation about podcasts on the World Economic Forum Podcast club -- look for that on Facebook.

This episode of Radio Davos was presented by me, Robin Pomeroy, with reporting by Laura Beltran. Studio production was by Gareth Nolan.

We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.