Sierra Leone students enjoying clean water thanks to Israeli technology

Students at a girls’ school in Sierra Leone have been enjoying a new system that pulls clean drinking water from the air with the help of Israeli technology.

Water pollution is one of the leading causes of death in West Africa and the retrieval of clean water can take young women several hours every day, eating into their education.

The innovative new system – called GEN-350 – was installed at St Joseph’s School in Freeport as part of a larger roll-out this month, and can produce 900 litres per day.

Manufactured by a company called Watergen, it uses a generator to take water from the atmosphere, bypassing the need to access dirty and polluted wells or travel several miles for fresh supplies.

The company’s president Yehuda Kaploun said it was working with the Sierra Leone government to combat the problem of water contamination caused in part by the country’s mining industry and by chemicals used in agriculture.

He said the unit was placed at St Joseph’s “to promote the importance of clean water” and that further units would help guard against water-borne infections and parasites, amid rising rates of Typhoid Fever and Hepatitis A.