The Mortenson Center Innovates to Reach Millions with Clean Water

Billions of people drink fecally contaminated water. Despite eighty years of modern development policy and investment from governments, donors, and companies, many water systems break down or supply dirty water, because of financial and technological failures.

Now, innovations developed by the Mortenson Center are being used around the world by partners to ensure clean drinking water for millions of people.

Often, low income communities simply cannot afford to cover the full costs of operating drinking water systems. Indeed, most high-income countries provide highly subsidized water, even to rich communities. In 2007, Professor Evan Thomas - then an engineer with NASA and now the Director of the Mortenson Center - led the development and implementation of the first-ever United Nations Clean Development Mechanism and Gold Standard programs earning carbon credits for water treatment - generating performance revenue to support water system operations and avoiding the demand and use of firewood and fossil fuels to boil water.

The programs Professor Thomas conceived and brought to practice have directly reached six million people globally with clean drinking water, while his methodologies have been adopted by other organizations reaching another estimated ten million people with clean water for the past ten years.

The programs have brought clean water to 6 million people globally.

Today, in partnership with the Millenium Water Alliance, the Swiss non-profit Helvetas, the Eastern Congo Initiative, Virridy and LifeStraw, the Mortenson Center is supporting clean drinking water services for over a million people in Kenya, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Madagascar, on track to reach over three million people by 2030 and generate over a million carbon credits. Among the carbon credit buyers is Mortenson Construction of Minneapolis.

To support these programs with rigorous evidence generation, Professor Thomas and the Mortenson Center team have invented and commercialized water monitoring technologies including an advanced water quality sensor. This technology uses tryptophan-like fluorescence combined with machine learning analytics to predict E. coli contamination. The Mortenson Center’s suite of satellite-connected sensor technologies have been deployed to monitor millions of people’s water supplies in over ten countries by many NGOs, governments, and the private sector.

Mortenson Center graduate students from Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Ghana have conducted programmatic, technological and economic research on these programs and products.