Beth Koiji is a Kenyan community development specialist who invented Majik Water, a technology that turns moisture into potable water. Using solar technology, Majik Water has brought clean water to drought-ravaged parts of Eastern Africa.

A growing need

Majik Water was not Beth Koigi’s first forays into developing community solutions. At the university in eastern Kenya, a young Koigi realised the water to her dormitory was unsafe for human consumption. She quickly designed her own filter to help make the water drinkable. Having created a working prototype, Beth created more filters which she sold to her flat mates.

Her entrepreneurship and community commitment would come to the fore again when Kenya suffered a water crisis in 2016. Rivers were running dry while the water table dropped further down to make it difficult to access water.

The drought was so bad that the young Kenyan inventor had to visit the mall in order to use the toilet. But that was not the solution she craved.

“Having no water at all is worse than just having unpurified water, so I started thinking about a way to not have to rely on the council,” she said.

If you have air, you have water

There is six times more water in the air than in all the rivers in the world. This hugely untapped resource provided a tremendous opportunity for communities facing water shortages to have access to clean drinking water. It was a resource Beth Koigi immediately took advantage of.

The Kenyan inventor teamed up with colleagues at the Singularity University in Silicon Valley to create a system that traps moisture from the air to convert it into drinking water. Beth and her team tested the prototype at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. With humidity levels of over 50%, the environment provided a viable representation of life in Kenya.

Majik Water

Majik Water harvests water from the air using solar power and desiccants like silica gels. A solar-powered fan is used to draw hot air through a filter, into desiccants. Desiccant materials trap water droplets from the moisture in the hot air. When they are heated, these gels then release the water they have trapped. A further condensation process using a condensing coil follows. The next step is a filtering process which includes activated carbon, after which the clean water is collected in receptacles for household consumption.

Beth’s current system is capable of collecting about 100 litres per day. The team has been able to provide potable water to institutions like The Ark Children’s Home in Thika, Kenya.

Saving 1.8 billion people

Majik Water has become an important source of potable water for off-grid communities at £0.08 per litter. The Kenyan inventor is looking to increase capacity to about a 1000 litres a day to provide cheap clean water on a larger scale.

The most expensive part of the water harvesting system is the solar technology. If she’s able to cut down costs, Beth Koigi and her team could help solve a big global crisis.

Approximately 1.8 billion people will face water shortages by 2025, according to a UN report. It is why water harvesting systems like Majik Water is being recognised and encouraged. Majik Water won the EDF Pulse Awards Africa prize in 2019. It was also shortlisted for the 2019 African Prize for Engineering Innovation by the Royal Academy of Engineering. The water harvesting technology was also a finalist in the 2018 UN Environment’s Young Champions of the Earth.