WaterWheel prize-winning product helping rural Indian women

Changing lives, one WaterWheel at a time

Cynthia Koenig on how she developed the prize-winning product 
which is helping rural Indian women put their time to better use

Women in Rajasthan carry water home. This routine sees them walk several kilometres and takes up many hours of their day

The WaterWheel makes light work of carrying as much as 50 litres of water

Cynthia Koenig, a young entrepreneur from New York, has developed a solution for thousands of Indian women who spend hours each day collecting water from distant sources. On realising that usually the pursuit was the responsibility of young girls and women, she created a way to help people in poor communities to transport water through an easy system.

Her company, Wello, manufactures a product called a WaterWheel, which enables people to roll water in a 50-litre container instead of carrying huge pots of water on their heads and walking several kilometres. The WaterWheel costs Rs2000 (Dh121) a piece and interested customers can find information about how to place an order on www.wellowater.org. For those who may not be able to afford it, microfinance could be the answer.

Koenig, founder and chief executive of Wello, a United States-based social venture that manufactures WaterWheels, won a $100,000 (Dh367,300) Grand Challenges Canada prize to develop WaterWheel further and is planning to make the product more useful by adding filtration and irrigation kits to it. Grand Challenges is funded by the Government of Canada and is dedicated to supporting ideas with huge impacts on global health.