Case study: Ram pump implementation in the Philippines

Auke Idzenga, a Dutch-born marine engineer introduced an NGO called the Alternative Indigenous Development Foundation, Incorporated (AIDFI). With this movement he tried to provide clean and affordable water in the Philippines and across Asia. In the article/interview that I have red there were posed a lot of socio-economical questions towards Idzenga, from which we can predict what effect the implementation of a hydram pump in a certain community. In this blog post I will make a small summary of the most interesting questions.

A first question handled how he introduced a ram pump to the local community. There he told the interviewer that AIDFI hired a marketing person that printed brochures, shot a video, wrote articles, and developed a website and allowed a prototype to show the working principle. Once several pumps were installed, the hydram began to promote itself. Another question handled the effects on the people’s lives. The hydram made sure that the locals had to spend less effort and time to access drinking water. But because the large volumes and the 24/7 working rate the hydram is ideal for irrigation purposes. Villagers were less dependent on rainfall increasing production and income. For example, the farmers started producing more vegetables the whole year round since the introduction of the pumps.

The NGO became less self-reliant after receiving several awards. They got attention from big companies like for example Coca-Cola who helped financing over 100 hydram sites. Since then they were able to sell ram pumps to other countries and even carrying out complete installation and manufacturing transfer to Afghanistan, Colombia, and Nepal.

The big difficulties that they encountered during the development were getting their hydram patented and dealing with the paper work for each project. Their model was only protected as a utility model, which did not stop other engineers from copying it. For each project a lot of paper pushing had to be done before the installation. Some villages made a bigger problem out of this than others.

For our small project, we can see that there are several things that we can learn from other projects. Things like promotion, patents and paper work did not yet cross my mind while these seem to be important factors. This summer, Lauren and I will visit several regions of Uganda where we will try to search a good partner/location for a hydraulic ram installation. So our promotion won’t be as wide like the AIDFI organisation but we will certainly have to try our best in convincing locals to let us help improve their hydraulic system.

I hope that this article gives a good insight at how the practical implementation of such a project comes together. If you have any remarks or questions concerning the article or our project, don’t hesitate to ask them.

Cheers,
Alexander

You can find the article here.