For many people around the world, water access is a major problem and a daily struggle. Today, up to almost one billion people still lack access to safely managed drinking-water. Especially in sub-Saharan Africa this remains a major issue for many countries. With this project, Quooker wants to help people in these regions gain access to safe drinking-water and help improve the quality of life.

To limit the scope, and make the project more manageable, the focal point is the urban areas of Ethiopia, and in particular Addis-Ababa. In urban areas, the concern surrounding drinking water is the degrading water quality rather than access to water. Improving the water quality is an area in which Quooker can use its expertise.

In Addis-Ababa, people have access to water from a tap point outside their homes. On average, people can get water from these tap points once a week. To bridge the periods of intermittence in the water supply, people store the water in jerrycans at home. During this ‘Water-Journey’ the water quality degrades due to user interactions and poor sanitation. In the end, only 24% of the water consumed by people can be considered safe to drink.

During this project, I developed a product that helps the people in Addis-Ababa treat their water at home by building on and using the expertises of Quooker. The design process focused on providing people in Addis-Ababa with an affordable, reliable and long-lasting product. To achieve this, different water treatment methods were analysed. UV-C was chosen as the preferred method due to its long lifespan and potential to innovate. Because UV-C is a novel technology in the context, this project became a feasibility study for the implementation of UV-C as a water treatment method in Addis-Ababa.

The end-result is the UV-Tap (figure 1), a jerrycan cap with an integrated disinfection system. It disinfects the water with UV-C light at the same time as it dispenses it., which kills the pathogens present in the water. With the UV-Tap a household can treat up to 15.000 L of water before components need to be replaced. This equals to approximately 3.5 years of drinking water for a household of 4 people.