Rain is a collection of a lot of water droplets falling from the sky. Together, these individual droplets provide a key element of the Earth’s water cycle, enabling life. For places where there is not sufficient rain available, desalination is a necessity to augment the water supplies. We make water using only the elements of the sea and sun as a solution for generations to come.

Within the desalination industry, there is a predominant focus on large-scale projects which feed over 300 million in urban population. However, if we look at the limited progress of access to clean water (SDG6), we will notice that 3 out of 4 people who lack access to safe water live in rural areas. Together all these rural areas account for around 43% of the world’s population. Yet there is no interest from the desalination industry in these small projects due to their limited financial size, tough logistics and challenges when it comes to operation & maintenance.

At Elemental Water Makers, we believe that this is where we can make a difference. In this update, you will find a video of an impressive drinking water project for a community in Yemen. We shipped 7 units to The Philippines for coastal communities, we commissioned a project in Belize, we upgraded two projects in Tanzania and several desalination projects were constructed for Latin America, the Pacific and the Caribbean. Together, all these smaller water users make a lot of water droplets. Together, we can make it rain.

Yemen is known as one of the countries with the biggest water scarcity in the world due to ongoing conflict and climate change. About 18 million people do not have access to safe, clean drinking water or sanitation facilities. Lack of clean drinking water is becoming one of the biggest challenges people will face in the coming years. Within the Yemen Joint Response, CARE and Elemental Water Makers have been working on a solution. We are proud to share the solution is now fully functional.

To enable clean water for a community, we built a solar-desalination solution that generates 5000 litres of clean water per day from the sea. To ensure local capacity building, we trained a WASH engineer of CARE at our headquarters in The Netherlands. By collaborating with local authorities and community representatives, the desalination solution was successfully installed and tested in the targeted location.

We are grateful to have been selected as a Finalist for the Global Prize for Innovation in Desalination (GPID) during the Innovation Driven Desalination conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It’s great recognition as one of the leading innovators in the field of sustainable desalination. We congratulate the other finalists and winners of the GPID award and hope that together we can continue to solve fresh water scarcity in a sustainable way using only the sea and sun.

When you need water, you want water fast. By working together with our partners in our supply chain and with some smart adjustments of our engineers, we were able to ramp up our production to ensure quicker delivery times.

Past months we built seven projects for communities in The Philippines, two projects for communities in New Caledonia, one for a private property in Mexico and we expanded two of our running projects in Tanzania. Meanwhile, we are working on several exciting projects in Nambia, Curaçao, Morocco and the Caribbean.