Spouts of Hope | Chasing Genius | National Geographic

I turned 19 that summer in Uganda, so I had a chance to work for a consulting firm after graduation and make lots of money. But I knew that this is where I [Music] belonged. I came to Uganda in 2010 to teach at an all-girls academy, and I was living with a host family. They were getting sick all the time because they were drinking dirty water. I was getting sick all the time too, and I think that was actually kind of the aha [Music] moment.

10,000 people die in Uganda every year drinking dirty water. Diarrheal diseases remain the second leading cause of death for children under the age of five. Access to clean drinking water is a basic human right, and it seems stupid to not have a solution for it. I had an engineering background, and I thought, given the abundance of clay, ceramic water filters are a great fit for Uganda. You take sawdust, clay, and then you grind them into really small pieces, add water, and you get this mass.

Then we just press it using a mold, and then they are put into the kiln and fired up till 900°. The sawdust combusts, leaving behind microscopic pores. It's a really simple process that uses physical filtration to allow bacteria to stay up top and the water to go down. I took the design and I approached a bunch of local organizations, and every single one of them turned me down. So then I was like, "Alright, well if no one's going to do it, then I'm going to do it."

Thank you. Good morning everyone, I'm Kathy. I'm John. I started out in the middle of nowhere in eastern Uganda, living with no running water and dirt floors. I got bitten by a rat once. It was a constant struggle trying to figure out whether or not this was actually going to work, and you start asking, "Why am I here?"

It took the three of us the entire day just to make 10 filters. At our new site, we can make 10,000 filters a month. You're not just impacting the 25 people who are making the filters; you have to think about where we get our clay from, where we get our other raw materials from, because we do it locally. It's impacted by the work that we're doing. We have provided 100,000 people with access to clean drinking water, but there's so much more to do.

I want a filter in every single household in [Music] Uganda. I think in the next couple of months, I can go to school while our team continues to grow. It's important for me to leave because I want to be able to go out and try something new, impact more lives, and I want to see where that potential leads me. I wonder what I can do. [Applause] [Music]