One of the key components of a winning World of 7 Billion video is the sustainable solution. This requirement encourages students to take they’re research one step further and demonstrates a deeper understanding of their topic. The sustainable solution offers students an opportunity to be innovative and showcase some of their ideas for change.
To help students in their brainstorm for their own solutions, here are some innovative ways people are helping to sustain water systems, ensure economic opportunities, and improve climate resiliency around the world.
Sustaining Water Systems
Peepoo
Currently, over 2.6 million people lack access to basic sanitation infrastructure. Sanitation infrastructure such as toilets and hand washing stations are essential to human health. Human waste carries harmful bacteria that can make people sick and contaminate water if it is not separated from where people live.
Peepoo is a slim single-use biodegradable bag meant to capture human waste. It is easy to use, store, and handle. Peepoo can be used anywhere in the world where people lack access to a toilet. This inventive solution goes one step further by turning waste into fertilizer that can then be used on crops.
P&G Water Purification
Nearly 800 million people still do not have access to safe drinking water services. Clean water is critical to human life. Even for those who have access to safe drinking water services, contamination prior to point of use remains a big problem.
Scientists at Proctor and Gamble were initially trying to find a way to separate dirt from used laundry water when they realized that this solution could also work for drinking water. These small packets of water purifying powder contain chemicals that settle impurities to the bottom of a container, disinfect water, and then allow people to filter out the safe drinking water for consumption.
Ensuring Economic Opportunities
Kiva
Financial inclusion of all peoples, especially women and youth, is necessary to end poverty. Microfinance is a service that provides loans of very small amounts to people who otherwise have no access to financial services. In recent years, microfinance has expanded beyond just loans to include other services, like insurance, that are vital for not only accumulating capital, but protecting that capital in the event of an emergency.
Kiva is a micro-lending platform. The Kiva website is a place where people who need a loan and people who want to loan money can connect. The people who need a loan set up a profile including a picture, information about why they want a loan and what it will go towards, how much they are interested in borrowing, and when they will pay back the loan.
Improving Climate Resiliency
Cities Alliance
The effects of climate change are real and people all over the world are already feeling them. It is going to take several integrated approaches in order to make people, cities, countries and the world resilient to the effects of climate change.
Cities Alliance provides support to rapidly urbanizing cities, and in particular slum areas, to build sustainable development. Slum dwellings are extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. By upgrading slum dwellings through infrastructure development, Cities Alliance helps people living in slums access housing, clean water, sanitation, and drainage (especially important with increasingly extreme weather events).
