Transforming Water, Sanitation, and Handwashing in India and Ethiopia

How can better design help reduce the spread of germs and illness in impoverished urban areas? Nick Ellington of Splash shares his organization’s work.

More than 3 million people move from rural to urban areas every week, many of them extremely poor. At this pace, experts estimate that, by 2030, 25% of the world’s population will live in urban slums, with limited access to clean water and improved sanitation. Nick Ellington of Splash explains how their WASH program has teamed up with innovative designers to create drinking and handwashing stations specifically for children in impoverished urban communities in Ethiopia, India, and Nepal that improve hygiene and reduce the spread of illness. Thanks to great design, these stations can be manufactured at scale, they are sturdy and resilient—they even withstood the Nepalese earthquake of 2015, and they can be moved to new locations for future use, making them a potential solution for refugee camps, as well.

About the speaker

Nick Ellington is a civil and environmental engineer. As the infrastructure manager for the WASH Program of Splash, he’s overseeing the production and distribution of drinking and handwashing stations to every public school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Kolkata, India.

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