I suppose this gives new meaning to the term ‘making it rain’ doesn’t it? Come on, that was a pretty decent effort.

Residents of Nairobi’s Mathare township can now access cheaper and cleaner drinking water thanks to an ATM-style dispenser system. The system works with a smart card and is said to be an improvement on vendors, often accused of overcharging or using polluted water sources.

Here’s the BBC with how it all works:

Residents swipe the smart cards, topped up at a kiosk or through a mobile phone, at the dispenser and water starts flowing from the tap…

The Nairobi City Water and Sewerage company says it is charging half a Kenya shilling (half a US cent) for 20 litres of water…

The dispensers have been set up through a partnership between the local government and the Danish water engineering company Grundfos.

Now obviously in an ideal world we would all have free access to clean running water but that ideal world went down in flames a long time ago. The price charged by the ATM dispenser is around one hundredth of the cost charged by many vendors, something that certainly means we are headed in the right direction.

It it estimated that around 700 million people around the world still do not have access to clean drinking water so let’s hope this is the start of something big.

[source:bbc]