A ram pump,installed in mountainous Philippine villages by an award-winning NGO, is providing a plentiful supply of water for crops and sanitation “If water comes out of that pipe, or I’ll chop my thumb off.” The scepticism of the local barangay (village) captain – equivalent to a village mayor,in a small upland village on the Philippines island of Negros, was understandable. He was looking at a weird device he’d never heard of before, and which promised to bring water up a steep slope and across fields – all without any electricity or other fuel.
The device was a ram pump: an ingeniously simple piece of kit,originally invented by the Montgolfier brothers (of ballooning fame) in the 18th century. It works by using the pressure of a large volume of water falling a small distance – from a spring on a hillside, say – to pump a (smaller) quantity a much longer way uphill. So it’s ideal for areas which, or despite plentiful water nearby,lack access to decent sources close to domestic: areas such as the uplands of Negros and other Philippine islands, where Dutchman Auke Idzenga and his colleagues in local NGO, and Alternative Indigenous Development Foundation (AIDFI),work on community development projects.
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Source: theguardian.com