During the spring of 2012, an Italian architect named Arturo Vittori decided to go for a ride through Ethiopia.
After flying to the capital city of Addis Ababa for a fancy convention on aircraft cabin design, he had some free time to take a tour of the country. He linked up with Ethiopian architect Tadesse Girmay Gebreegziabher, who took him on a northward route that wound through the legendary rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, the ancient castles of Gondar, and the sparkling Lake Tana in Bahir Dar.
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The architect had plenty of questions. “On our way we saw ladies carrying jerrycans and Arturo asked me, ‘What are they doing?’ And I told him—because when we were kids we used to do the same thing—that they were bringing water because they don’t have access to water at home,” Tadesse says.
The experience affected Vittori. “We came across this very tough reality, seeing women and children walking for kilometers through the fields to get water, and the water they collect is not always safe,” he told me. “So I started thinking about how to find an alternative solution.”
And so the WarkaWater concept was conceived: a massive vase-basket-tower-thing that harvests water from thin air.
The project has generated plenty of buzz, and the idea does have a lot going for it. The reedy outer shell houses a mesh structure that collects droplets from condensation, which then slip down into waiting containers.
Vittori estimates it can deliver between 50 and 100 liters a day and will cost only about $500 per unit to install, requiring no mechanical tools (a basic well can cost thousands). The structure has no moving parts and will be user-friendly, low-maintenance, and biodegradable.
People are already using condensation elsewhere, like in the highlands of Chile and Peru, where no-frills sheets of non-absorbent mesh strung up between poles can produce several hundred liters of water on a good day. Granted, those yields are easier to achieve in places where the fog is as thick as soup. But if something so simple can work so well, why should Warkatowers be so elaborate?
For Vittori, architecture is art. His work has found its greatest acclaim at international exhibits, from Beijing to Cairo to San Francisco. “Aesthetics is a very important element if you want to make something sustainable,” he said. “If it is good-looking, people will appreciate it, and there’s more of a chance of integrating it.”
“It looks like a flower!” says Tadesse. “I think they want to make it beautiful.”
In the real-world context of rural Ethiopia, though, there’s no guarantee that the lovely-looking WarkaWater tower will deliver. Five prototype towers have been constructed, but there have been no on-site tests so far. The project still needs a finished business plan before it can start attracting investors, and the tower’s final design is still evolving. The best-known model—one that’s been exhibited in Milan—was nine-meters-tall and used a strong, flexible reed called juncus, imported from Asia. Vittori says the final design could be 12 meters tall and should be made from local products. He thinks bamboo might do the trick.
But even once the design is finalized, there’s still context to worry about.
Ethiopia is popular with do-gooders. Three decades have passed since the catastrophic famine of the 80s—when a media bonanza thrust Ethiopia into the spotlight, raked in millions of dollars of donor aid, and made pop singer Bob Geldof’s career. And plenty of Westerners still see the country as a place of abject destitution. But some things have changed. With help from ongoing donor aid, Ethiopia has made good progress lowering its rates of poverty, maternal mortality, and child malnutrition—indicators that make development experts swoon.
Still, around one third of the population still lives on less than $1.25 a day. About 80 percent of the population lives in rural areas with most surviving on small-scale agriculture. Ethiopia’s approach to these issues is top-down—you might call it authoritarian—with initiatives from Addis Ababa pushed through the pipeline via pervasive education programs, and local “development agents” who keep an eye on progress. The government pursues water infrastructure on a case-by-case basis. In scattered rural communities, groundwater wells are the most common solution.
I went to see Dr. Geremew Sahilu, an expert in water infrastructure at Addis Ababa University, who thinks WarkaWater sounds like an interesting idea but “requires detailed study on which areas it would be actually effective in, and then you have to have a discussion at the federal level.” “I am not saying they would face a problem, but they should fit into the system and involve concerned stakeholders from the beginning,” he said.
It could all come down to one question: Is there a need for small projects like WarkaWater? UNICEF estimates that in order to meet their basic needs, communities need access to 20 litres—one standard-sized jerrycan—per person, per day. In Ethiopia, the average household size in rural areas exceeds five. So the average woman (and this job does fall disproportionately to the women) who is strong enough to carry two full containers at a time would have to make three trips to and from the nearest water source in order to keep her family healthy.
Now imagine there’s a Warka tower in the community. The benefits could be kind of negligible. With yields of up to 100 liters per day, one tower could meet UNICEF’s basic standards for five people at most. You’d need a whole farm of vase-basket-tower-things to supply enough water for a village, and even that could only work if the environment and temperatures are conducive to condensation, which is not typically the case in low-lying areas.
Luckily, Ethiopia has plenty of highlands. Geremew thinks the project has potential since even one WarkaWater tower could be useful for a school or health center. After all, condensation harvesting is new technology for Ethiopia. “It’s worth trying and it’s also a research interest for some people,” he says.
Vittori hopes to have the first working WarkaWater tower on-site by the end of 2015, and it’s going to be pretty. “This is one important part of my design philosophy—art should help somehow,” he says. “Everything around Ethiopia is beautiful, and nature is really the master of producing things that are, however beautiful, always functional.”