Propsal

Water is the most essential substance on the planet. All living beings on the planet requires water for basic survival needs. Currently there is a water crisis in the developing world. According to stats, 884 million people in the world does not have access to clean water. This puts huge pressure on all social aspects of life such as economy, education and health care. More than 50% of hospitals in Sub Saharan Africa are occupied by patients suffering from water related or sanitation diseases and 4000 children per day die from water related diseases. Often in the developing world, people need to spend hours walking miles just to salvage clean water. The amount of energy and time put into obtaining water take away their education privileges. All this leads to around 5% of GDP lost to just the lack of access to clean water in Africa.
 * The Problem**

Intended Solution
Our design is aim to serve the other 90% population in the world. Our group focuses on the problem of lack of clean water and contamination issues in developing countries. The sustainable technology that we will be designing is a water harvest system that collects rain water on the roof of the new shelters. After collecting the rain water, the water will be transferred through a pipe system into a water tank. The tank is aimed to connect several shelters and save up water collected by the roof of these shelters. One of such design would be having the roof of these shelters that is slightly curved downward acting as inverse dome to maximizes the collection of rainwater. Another designs such as better gutter and pipe systems will also be employed to yield better results.


 * Targeting communities**

The targeting communities of our design would be developing world regions that does not have an established water pipe infrastructure and therefore have a strong need of alternative access to clean water. Our design is very useful for areas with abundant amount of natural rainfall during specific periods. For example in Algeria, there is a sufficient amount of rainfall during spring and winter time. However, the amount of rainfall drops massively during the summer months. On the other hand, Bangladesh has massive amount of rainfall during summer time but the amount drops significantly during spring and winter time. As a result, there would be a water supply shortage for these communities during dry seasons.

Also, water contamination and diseases due to drinking unclean water are some of the major problems in developing communities. Our design also aims to filter the water collected and therefore provide the households with access to clean water. The water storage system will be equipped with certain filtering technologies to help alleviate the threat of diseases With our sustainable technology, we hope to improve the problem of water contamination and decrease the diseases link to it.

Rainwater for the most part is clean to drink after boiling, and it also has a wide variety of other practical uses such as irrigation and cleaning. Therefore harvesting rainwater can have many practical uses with little impact on the environment. Additionally, our rain water harvesting designs will require no electric power and all methods use to harvest is purely automatic though pipe systems.
 * Sustainability**

Sources http://www.gdrc.org/uem/water/rainwater/introduction.html http://www.endwaterpoverty.org/the_issue/