Design of Sustainable Water Pumps for Burkina Faso

The Department of Engineering at Messiah College has partnered with the Handicaps en Avant, (a center for rehabilitation and education of handicapped persons in southeast Burkina Faso) for over a decade.One of the enduring student-faculty projects spawned from this relationship is the Modified Rower Pump Project.The long-term vision of this project is to provide a sustainable design, including construction methods, allowing local manufacturers to build water pumps as part of their businesses.The present goals of the project are to quantify the pump's performance, to improve the pump's durability, to reduce material and construction costs, to develop more reliable construction techniques, and to create a versatile handle design that accommodates a variety of operator positions.The project exposes students to the challenges of solving an urgent, real problem within the constraints of a depressed economy, severely limited resources, and cultural preferences and biases.This paper summarizes the project's origins, the iterations of previous pump designs and installations leading to the current pump design, and the issues encountered while designing solutions for use in developing countries.