Goats ate on grass strewn with plastic trash when Phylis Mueni walked through. She was carrying three jerrycans of 20-liter capacity, which once contained vegetable oil. One was which was bright yellow and matched her oversized T-shirt. Everything else was a smattering of reds and browns: the corrosion-prone metal of corrugated roofing, the labyrinth of mud-built houses, and the drainage ditch that was a part of the gully route. Mueni is a resident of Korogocho (which means “shoulder-to-shoulder” in Swahili), one of Nairobi’s most extensive and roughest slums. Mueni was seeking one of the most essential elements: water. In places such a situation has access to running water. When it’s good, residents travel up to 300 feet to refill their containers for a couple of cents. On days of shortage that occur about once every week, the hunt can last a whole day, and customers could be charged more than the regular price.
Mueni entered a schoolyard via the door made from sheet metal and painted yellow, which read Kao La Tumaini (Place of Hope.) Inside, the courtyard was occupied by a new school expansion, which stood out in stark contrast to the surroundings. Built of smooth, white metal and plastic, a hexagonal HabiHut water station protruded towards the sky at an acute angle, sporting a solar panel and an individual light fixture at its highest point and water taps in its base. With a water tank, filtering system, solar panels, and batteries for charging cell phones, these stations can provide up to 1,000 people daily. For the poor Kenyans, mobile phones are rapidly becoming a potent information source that connects them to work, financial networks, and security information. In a country where 40% of the population can’t access clean water and only 20% have electricity, such kiosks are an opportunity to find optimism.
It is an initiative pilot that brings together the Kenyan government and non-profit organizations, local entrepreneurs and communities, and American firms of all sizes. HabiHut is a small Montana-based company born from the wreckage of a high-end contractor business that failed during the housing crisis. HabiHut was the company that developed its HabiHut modular kit and, along with the local Kenyan non-profit Umande Trust, is in the process of joining forces with General Electric, which is offering water filtration, solar panels and battery systems as the pilot program expands across Kenya. It is planned to set up 200 additional kiosks to provide up to 1,600 gallons of clean drinking water daily. If everything goes according to plan, they’d like to replicate this model in other areas, such as India or Southeast Asia.
Kenya required something almost improvised for water distribution to people like Phylis Mueni. The HabiHut’s mobility and impermeability are ideal for this purpose. They were initially brought to Kenya and Haiti for emergency shelter; Umande realized they could be converted into water stations. “For a permanent water kiosk, you need to get a city permit from the authority,” explained Josiah Omotto, managing trustee of Umande. After a lengthy application process, “still nothing happens after months. You must use their standard layout,” he told me while sitting at his desk in Kibera, another vast Nairobi area, which means there’s not much chance to experiment and improve. “Let’s be out of this cycle,” he urged.
HabiHuts are considered impermanent; They can get around Kenyan building rules. They’re also fast. The modular structures arrive in a four-foot-by-eight-foot package and pop up in a day. When the program is installed, the water will be sourced from either the system of cities or from delivery trucks that draw from a nearby natural source like a river, and the filters can get rid of protozoal, viral, and bacterial pathogens that cause typhoid, cholera and other water-borne illnesses that infect slum dwellers. When water sources become fragile, if city pipes fail or mafia-like groups with their tentacles on water distribution demand bribes or even cut off the water supply to create artificial demand, the HabiHuts could be moved to a safer location. It’s akin to guerrilla warfare for water.
The program is not rebellious. It aims to combine an entrepreneurial model with innovative engineering to tackle the adolescent issue of water scarcity. The concept is that Umande will encourage local community groups and entrepreneurs to operate the water kiosks to earn profits while offering water, phone charging services, and phones. Ronald Omyonga, an architect and consultant for the project, travels across the country looking for potential partners who can contribute a small percentage of the cost to demonstrate their commitment.
When other locals gathered with Mueni on the Korogocho HabiHut, where they set their tanks on a wooden platform, Kelvin Bai, from Umande’s Water manager, stood close by smiling. “To me, growing up,” Kelvin Bai said, “water was the major issue.” He grew up in Kibera, and his mother would trek up three miles in search of water for her family. “When I came of age, I was sent out in search of water too.”
Abdi Mohammed is chairman of the Mwamko Wa Maendeleo Youth Group, which manages the Korogocho site. The area “is a black spot, with a lot of violence,” Abdi Mohammed said. “It is known for muggings, in broad daylight.” He sat up and looked at the only light on the HabiHut. “That lighting on that HabiHut is extremely useful. It’s the only one in this field. There is optimism in situations like this.”
Mobile phones aren’t as essential as water, but are getting close. In a mere five years, the number of mobile phones increased from one million to 6.5 million in Kenya. The East African nation is at the forefront of using mobile phones for information and finance for low-income people. Kenyans utilize mobile phones to get micro-insurance to protect their crop, monitor the progress of violence in moments of unrest, and earn money in a country that has an unemployment rate of 40 percent by using a text-based system similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that connects businesses to people who can complete simple tasks for a small fee. Kenya is also among the first countries to introduce an extensive mobile banking system called M-Pesa. Using mobile phones, users can purchase everything from bus trips to utility bills to water at the local HabiHut kiosk. Umande also collaborates with Stanford University to create a mobile crowd-sourcing platform so that people who live in settlements can find inexpensive, clean water during days of shortage. When mobile phones are used to access essential services, ensuring they’re fully ultimately charged is crucial.
Within the HabiHut, one young man in the youth group was soaking in the warmth of the light shining through the transparent panels. He used a hand pump inside and leaned his head to ensure the gold flowed. It was released in a large stream into Mueni’s waiting vessel. Before this kiosk existed, Mueni had to go “Mbali!”–far!–she stated, putting her hands over her head toward the nearest traditional water station about a third of a mile away. Then, she arrives at this small oasis of optimism.