Murendeni Mafumo

With the deep belief that only solutions with community ownership will take root and thrive, that only solutions tailored to meet the needs of the communities they serve will be truly effective, and that only solutions that make efficient use of resources like renewable energy and water itself will be successful, particularly as climate change shapes our future, Murendeni is promoting access to clean and affordable water for marginalized communities across South Africa using sustainable innovation and a community-centered approach.

South Africa’s water services, built during apartheid, were largely designed for white neighborhoods and those who could afford to pay. This has made water provisions to rural and poor areas difficult to implement and sustain. Through his organization, Kusini Water, Murendeni is providing decentralized community based low-cost purification systems that are easy to operate and repair, and capable of producing sufficient water to distribute it within close proximity of small groups of households in rural communities and informal settlements in peri-urban areas. By decentralizing water provision Murendeni can reach those communities that have been left out due to a highly centralized model that privileges those that can pay over those who cannot. Kusini Water’s innovation is human centered infrastructure built on accessing local leadership, e.g. tribal leaders, school principals, or clinic heads, fostering local participation and ownership through local committees representing different functions required to manage the waters systems, and enabling young people to become Water Champions of their local communities, who become trained systems operators and water/health educators.

Access to water is at the center of human dignity and improves health outcomes. According to the WHO, communities with steady access to clean water are more protected from poor health and exposure to communicable diseases such as coronavirus. But more than six million South Africans currently lack access to clean and safe water, including children in up to 33% of schools located in rural and informal settlements. The effects of climate change and a growing urban population exacerbate the problem, so much so that even more South Africans may have limited supplies of fresh water by 2030. Where there is no clean water, people can purify dirty water, dig wells, or work with surveyors to find alternate sources of water. But low-income communities face a lack of investment in these projects and are often not able to sustain these efforts. Funders usually do not see a guarantee of return, so they tend not to invest in infrastructure or enable local ownership of it.

Murendeni and Kusini Water aim to accelerate universal access to safe water in South Africa and many other African countries, and to decentralise water provision in the interest of the most vulnerable communities. The simplicity of the system and its effectiveness, along with partners and income generation, create conditions for adoption by multiple communities. They are delivering pioneering low-cost and environmentally friendly technology that enables entire communities facing water scarcity to collect and purify water using environmentally friendly, sustainable technologies. His model involves a locally designed, solar-powered, mobile water purification system that uses an activated carbon filter made from macadamia nut shells and activated by renewable energy sources. Each device is customisable so that its treatment regimen adapts to the quality of on-site raw water. His system purifies at least 1,000 litres of water per day per settlement in rural and peri-urban contexts.

Recognizing the importance of local ownership, in each community about 10 young people are upskilled in water management through the water champions programme, a skills development programme designed to give technical training to young people, primarily unemployed women, to manage the Kusini Water systems in the community. Water Champions earn a recognised qualification to work in the water sector as the training is an accredited program under the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) in the basics of water technology and treatment. This programme also aims to improve economic participation by training them to run water kiosks. Over the last 3 years Kusini Water has been able to reach close to 50 communities with access to clean water, which represents more than 200,000 people.

Globally over a billion people in the world and over 6 million people in South Africa lack access to safe drinking water. In South Africa, up to 1 in 3 schools in rural and informal settlements do not have access to clean water and sanitation. Studies from the WHO and other health data show that communities with access to clean and flowing water are a lot more protected from communicable diseases. Lack of clean water as well as lack of access to any water leads to burdens of disease, additional work, and secondary effects on health, education, and livelihoods. Clean water is shown to be the most effective tool to prevent the spread of viruses such as coronavirus. However, many communities still have no access to clean water, and with climate change and a growing urban population, more and more communities will see themselves with an insecure water supply by 2030. This problem has meant that in Africa alone up to 20% of children in poor countries do not reach the age of 5 because of infectious diseases provoked by poor water quality, according to UNESCO.

South Africa remains a water-scarce country and is facing a challenge in the delivery of water and sanitation services caused by among other factors, insufficient water infrastructure maintenance and investment; recurrent droughts driven by climatic variation; inequities in access to water and sanitation; and deteriorating water quality. Furthermore, the current water system was built to supply water to a privileged few under apartheid. The cost of centralized infrastructure is high and often prioritizes those who can pay over those who cannot afford to pay. This has led to unequal access to water as local government’s water services must make some key decisions around continued revenue water services or increasing water services to low-income communities where revenue is not guaranteed. This problem becomes more pressing as we see the impact of climate change on water resources.

According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), as much as 30 to 50 percent of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) projects fail after just two to five years, leaving recipients of the new wells, toilets, or other projects back where they started – even worse off sometimes, often because communities do not have the resources or understanding to keep them going. There are currently two main solutions to the water shortage. The first is aid-based water well drilling or projects. Most aid work is based on well drilling and hand-dug pumps in communities. This is often a challenge as it never has local ownership and often when the pump breaks there is no sustainability or local know-how to fix it. The second solution is the point of use treatment using things such as chlorine pills; in this case the community would have communal chlorine dispensing stations where people come in and sanitize their water. This is effective for communities that rely on water that could be coming from contaminated sources, but it is not effective in removing viruses, pathogens, or any other microorganisms that could be in the water. This also does not solve the big burden of walking to collect water from a source.

Murendeni’s idea to build a decentralized, locally sustainable, and low-cost water cleaning solution for low-income communities in Africa started with using off-waste macadamia nut shells and nanofibers to purify locally sourced water and using solar power to distribute water at a hyper-localized scale. Based on this idea, a system was developed to deliver 5,000 to 20,000 liters daily of clean water to communities using water sourced locally, from the ground, sea, or rain.

Its technology uses a low-pressure membrane system, which means that the treatment system can produce water without needing grid energy. This is critical as most of the locations they operate in do not have a guaranteed electricity supply and electrical wires are also at higher risk of theft and disrepair. The second advantage is that the system does not create waste or use any chemicals in treating water. While most reverse-osmosis systems waste one liter for every liter they produce, the Kusini Water systems can recover up to 97% of the treated water and use 3% in recycling projects around their sites.

The water purification system uses an activated carbon filter made from macadamia nut shells. Each device purifies at least 1,000 liters of water a day. It uses macadamia nut shells, not so much for their chemical properties, but their strength. Shells are incinerated and processed into filters. They also work to harness the use of nanotechnology fibers to separate various bacteria from the water. The nut shells, which are otherwise typically discarded, are sourced from small-scale macadamia farmers in Venda, Limpopo, towards the north of the country, who take their produce to a facility for processing. Kusini Water partners with them to de-shell and use the material from a central facility in Limpopo.

The biggest difference between Kusini Water’s technology and the current best practices is that it is human-centered, based as much on social engineering as on the actual technology. The criterion for selecting a site is as follows: 1) communities with recognised leadership, either tribal or chieftaincy, facing water access challenge; and 2) normally the first site is a school clinic or other high traffic sites. The site is typically identified after a first meeting with the chief (or royal council). The site selection process is informed by experience through working in different communities and iterating the process through lessons learnt along the way. Kusini Water previously identified sites and tried to work through the local government, but this did not work out due to corruption. They were often asked for bribes to set up the treatment unit or to work in the community and this was against their principles as an organisation. In this way, Kusini Water is also focused on creating blueprints on how to partner and collaborate with local leaders and government. Due to the nature of their decentralized model, they will scale better by making partnering with local communities and leaders a lot easier and getting buy-in quickly.

Once they approach or identify a location, they encourage the local leadership to form a water committee of about 3-4 representatives that will be the main liaisons in rolling out the system and being custodians of it. The committee helps them find, train, and certify young people (who have demonstrated an interest in changemaking within the community) to operate, train, and build local capacity to ensure that each project is maintained so that continues to operate efficiently once handed to the community. To this end, each project Kusini Wateroperates comes with an Internet of Things (IoT) enabled water sensor that allows the team to remotely monitor water flow and troubleshoot some problems. The biggest reason many projects in water fail is because when something breaks communities usually do not have the financial, technical, or human resources to fix the problem. With this model, Murendeni and his team ensure that each community knows how the system operates, each community is part of the ownership of that system, and that each community understands the importance of the system.

Through the partnership with local youth and leaders, they can collect monthly reports on how each system is operating, and corresponding health data from local clinics. This safeguards the system from failing with no one doing anything about it, and builds understanding of the impact of the water system on public health outcomes. Community partnership and ownership, ease of maintenance and operations, and more automation form a foundation of decentralized water systems that eventually deliver water to people’s homes. Thus, through providing more clean water Kusini would like to see the elimination of waterborne diseases in the communities they serve. So far, through monitoring health data, they see fewer breakouts of waterborne diseases and an increased number of hours for all kids attending school. The aim is to optimize the system and ensure consistent maintenance to create consistent water flow to communities that have never had any access to water as close to their homes as possible. At every installation a water sensor is added and Kusini can measure immediately how much water is flowing as close to homes as possible.

Since 2016, Kusini Water has worked with a multitude of both South African and international companies as funding partners, to bring water to all nine provinces in South Africa. On a monthly basis they collect and purify five million litres of clean water in over 50 sites. Kusini Water has achieved this through corporate sponsorship and grant funding. From 2021 on, 30% of the income has come from water ATMs, which is an important revenue stream to insure sustainability. The water kiosks provide water for a low cost of ZAR1 per liter in high traffic areas such as shopping centers, clinics, and schools. The proceeds from the water kiosks help to subsidize clean water to communities that cannot pay to ensure the model is sustainable. Murendeni plans to expand the reach of Kusini Water, reaching five million people by 2025. Currently, Kusini Water is piloting the water kiosks in Namibia and Zimbabwe as demonstration sites to develop new partnerships and raise money to expand into these countries.

Murendeni was born in Limpopo, one of the poorest regions in South Africa. He was raised by his single mom in his grandparents’ household. For as long as he can remember, water was always a topic of conversation in his community: whether they would have water that day, whether they needed to wait for the water truck, and every household had a big blue 100-liter water container that they used to store water for drinking and cooking. Local radio stations had suggestions lines open and one of the main asks was for the government to get clean water.

One of the most transformative moments in Murendeni’s life was when his mother bought him a set of encyclopedic books for kids called “Young Scientist” that taught kids different scientific principles with experiments. These books transformed his life and made him fall in love with science from a place where very few were scientists. As a teenager, he had fun leading the expansion of his uncle’s concentrated juice business to other communities.

Murendeni studied water management in the leading University of Cape Town, discovering a new world where access to water was a given. After eight years working for the city of Cape Town Water and Sanitation Department and Johannesburg Water, the realities of unequal access to clean water hit him again. While back home in Limpopo, for a visit during a hot summer, he was struck by seeing a young boy pushing a wheelbarrow up a hill with heavy cans of water. Coming from a community that was self-sufficient, one of the key design principles for Kusini was leveraging local resources and not creating dependency on expensive infrastructure. He left his secure job as a civil engineer with Johannesburg Water and became a YALI Fellow to develop his idea and later founded Kusini Water in 2016 to ensure that everyone could have access to a source of clean drinking water. He is currently a Ford Foundation Global Fellow. He named the organization Kusini Water because Kusi means a small village in Tshivenda, his mother tongue. Small villages are green with maize and tea plantations where spring bubbles and clean streams meander throughout to nourish and feed. Kusini is the definition of Nirvana.