2011 Ramon Magsaysay Awards: Pinoy NGO builds low-cost water pump for poor tillers

MANILA, Philippines - One of today’s challenges to improve the lives of the world’s bottom billion or those who live on a dollar a day or less is for people and organizations to devise low-cost technologies that could have a big effect on impoverished communities.

In the Philippines, a non-profit organization is quietly doing just that.

The Alternative Indigenous Development Foundation Inc. (AIDFI) is a Filipino social enterprise group and a non-profit organization in the province of Negros Occidental that has, for years, been building technology to serve the poor.

AIDFI designs simple solutions to the problems of the rural poor by fabricating and promoting environment-friendly technology which is accessible and income-augmenting for the poor.

The group, which reinvented the ram pump technology which can lift water to an upland reservoir, is one of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay awardees.

Dutch marine engineer Auke Idzenga, head of AIDFI’s technical department, said the award serves as an inspiration for them to continue and pursue their causes.

“We feel very honored. This is a prestigious award, it’s a stimulation. It’s our reward for the years that we worked hard without funding,” Idzenga told The STAR.

AIDFI’s higher goal is to spread the technology to other countries that need it. Currently, AIDFI has brought the ram pump technology to waterless upland communities in other countries and is now carrying out complete ram pump technology transfer in Afghanistan, Colombia, Nepal, Malaysia and Japan.

In the Philippines, AIDFI has fabricated, installed and transferred 227 ram pumps that now benefit 185 upland communities in Negros Occidental and other provinces.

“We do the installations ourselves, we transfer the model to Afghanistan, Nepal and Colombia,” Idzenga said.

“Our goal is to let this technology be a spin-off into a social enterprise to solve employment problems in the country. We don’t expect the call centers or the BPOs in Manila to solve the problem in the countryside. We want social enterprises like this to be instruments to uplift the lives of the poor,” he said.

“In Europe, there is an economic rethinking of creation of employment. We want young people, engineers, to also consider going into these kinds of social enterprises, go into designing low-cost technologies to help the poor,” Idzenga added.

With the technology, he said the lives of the poor improved markedly.

“Because they have water, there’s less skin health diseases, they started to grow vegetables, they also have small fishponds. They have water for their carabaos. Life has improved for them,” he said.

AIDFI was started during the 1980s, born out of the social turmoil that accompanied the collapse of the sugar industry in Negros at that time.

In the wake of this crisis, a small group of social activists which included Idzenga decided to form AIDFI to address the basic needs of the affected farmers.

Agricultural production and technology development were their initial strategies, but lack of funds and quitting members forced the group to close down.

Idzenga, meanwhile, went back to the Netherlands with his Filipina wife and children. When he came back to Negros in 1997, he decided to revive AIDFI, with a clear focus on innovating technology to help poor, rural families have clean and cheap water for household use as well as livestock raising, aquaculture, and small-scale agriculture.

He said he stumbled upon an ancient and largely abandoned technology called the ram pump which uses the natural kinetic energy of flowing water from rivers or springs to push water uphill without gas or electricity.

As reinvented by AIDFI, the ram pump can lift water to an upland reservoir, with a volume of 1,500 to 72,000 liters of water per day.

Idzenga said AIDFI continues to innovate on technology for the poor. To increase rural incomes AIDFI has designed and fabricated an essential oil distiller that can process lemongrass into organic oil for industrial users.

It transfers this technology to farmers and provides packaging and marketing support and a distribution network that now reaches other countries.

In electing AIDFI to receive the 2011 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes their collective vision, technical innovations and partnership practices to make appropriate technologies improve the lives of the rural poor in upland Philippine communities and elsewhere in Asia.