Self-assembled Water Pump Brings a Low-cost and Environmentally Friendly Irrigation Solution

Published on by in Technology

Self-assembled Water Pump Brings a Low-cost and Environmentally Friendly Irrigation Solution

A simple, self-assembled water pump brings a low-cost and environmentally friendly irrigation solution to farmers, increasing food security and improving the lives of smallholder farmers across Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

aqysta.jpg

Image by aQysta

aQysta, a “clean-tech” start-up, injects its entrepreneurial energy into the Business Call to Action (BCtA) platform with a pledge to bring its affordable, clean-energy water pump to 10,000 smallholder farmers globally to save 300 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, while improving crop yields and incomes, by 2021.

 

Launched in 2008, BCtA aims to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by challenging companies to develop inclusive business models that engage people with less than US$10 per day in purchasing power (in 2015 dollars) as as consumers, producers, suppliers, distributors of goods and services and employees. It is supported by several partners and hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Water is essential to successful agriculture and food security. Subsistence farming communities around the world have long-relied on rainfall to sustain crops, yet in an era of climate change, this already uncertain water source is further threatened. Smallholder farmers that either own or rent land for agriculture can pay a high price to rent access to irrigation, and some simply do without it, despite flowing rivers or canals existing nearby.

Access to reliable irrigation can boost agricultural productivity up to five times compared to rain-fed crops, however regular forms of irrigation pumps are often costly to acquire, operate and maintain especially in remote rural contexts where transport costs increase. Farmers that can affrod these irrigation system tend to see a reduction in profit margins due to costs and struggles of implemnation.

aQysta’s Barsha Pump addresses a gap in the market for cost-effective, reliable irrigation that could help farmers move away from subsistence to commerical farming in locations where rivers, streams and canals are vast but irrigation systems too costly. The Barsha Pump looks like a wheel floating on water and relies on energy created in the flowing current of rivers and canals to pump water through a hose, up hills, as far as two kilometres away. There is no need for fuel or electricity to operate the pump, bringing the operating cost and environmental impact down to zero.

Read the full story on Business Call to Action

Media

Taxonomy