Waterkiosk Africa: Start-up leveraging solar energy to provide clean water for hospitals in Kenya

To bridge this gap, the start-up, WaterKiosk Africa, has come up with an innovation where it is leveraging renewable energy solutions to treat water for use in institutions, especially hospitals. 

Waterkiosk Africa simply installs, operates and maintains solar water desalination systems for off-grid communities around Africa.

According to Waterkiosk Africa co-founder Samuel Kinyanjui, the company ensures inclusivity in their model of operation, ensuring impact-oriented results, engaging community stakeholders and promoting women as kiosk operators.

“Our project installations cuts across Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Somali, Somaliland, Botswana and Senegal,” Kinyanjui said.

After identifying the institution that needs clean water, Waterkiosk Africa installs its solar-powered desalination systems. The desalination process then starts by filtering contaminated resources, removing 99% of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) to produce clean water, devoid of organic/inorganic contaminants, bacteria, and viruses.

Designed as an independent, low-maintenance, off-grid system, the desalination system operates without diesel generators or grid connections, using DC electricity from solar panels.

A small solar array suffices for its power needs, making it ideal for areas lacking access to clean water. The installed systems are then monitored remotely ensuring optimal system performance.

“We ensure the content of minerals and the pH in water is according to the standards placed by World Health Organisation and Kenya Standards Act,” Kinyanjui added. 

Selection of the facility to install the systems depends on a number of factors, among them the need for clean water, a bed capacity of 25 and above and one with an existing borehole.

The venture particularly prioritised hospitals because of the experiences they had during the Covid-19 pandemic. A need for clean hygiene water emerged as one of the critical needs for hospitals as they attended to more patients. 

The systems installed in the beneficiary hospitals vary between 2000lph to 10000lph.

To expand its operations and reach, Waterkiosk Africa also runs the WaterKiosk Academy where it trains different categories of people, including operators, users and owners. The training covers basic technology and detailed emphasis on its Solar Desalination System and technology.

So far, Waterkiosk has managed to provide safe and clean water to 30 hospitals with a daily production capacity of 1,000,000 litres, benefitting six million people annually.

Through this, the start-up has directly employed 55 people and 150 others indirectly.

Waterkiosk Africa's transformative initiatives have attracted support from organisations and governments such as the develoPPP.de program which DEG implements on behalf of German Ministry of Economic Corporation and Developments (BMZ).

Currently, the start-up is covering Kenya and Tanzania, and is dispensing over one million litres of clean hygiene. 

“We are looking at expanding and dispensing over 10 million litres per day of clean water, covering the continent of Africa,” Kinyanjui further said.

Waterkiosk Africa looks forward to getting more well-wishers and supporters to increase the hospital coverage not only on clean water supply, but also on solar power supply for the hospitals.