CASE STUDY

ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY IN THE DEVELOPING

WORLD

With recent initiatives of ceramic filters in the home and

chlorination at the plant, Communidad Connect urged us to assess

the water quality and effectiveness of their chlorination method of

the town through microbial contamination analysis and residual

levels of chlorine in the drinking water.

THE TEAM

The Yale University team includes: Jaehong Kim PhD.,

Evan Doyle ’17, Eva Albalghiti ’17, Theodore Agbi ’17,

Kamya Jagadish ’16, Adam Sokol ’17, Tanya Shi ’17, Anna

Hagstrom (Graduate Assistant), Stephanie Loeb

(Graduate Assistant).

BACKGROUND

We ventured on a 4 day project based in Los Robles,

Nicaragua intending to use the DelAgua Kit. Los Robles

has taken the issue of clean water head on. The

Brigadistas, 13 women fighting for public health, has

been at the forefront of this fight helping to organise the

water treatment plant that now delivers approximately 2

million gallons of water a month to the community. From

laying the piping system to organising the volunteer

based maintenance of the system, the Brigadistas

alongside the NGO Comunidad Connect has progressed

the issue of clean water.

WWW.DELAGUA.ORG

We chose to use the DelAgua unit for its easy to use and versatile

mobile design. We designed a project that would test water at

various points along the distribution network to assure the

chlorine was effective throughout the network. In order to get

accurate microbial counts from various water samples we not only

varied our sampling points, but also intended to test microbial

counts before and after the planned installation of our new

chlorine injector system.

Finally, to help quantify the efforts of the Brigadistas we aimed to

use the DelAgua unit to understand quantitatively how much safer

the water was to drink after being filtered through local clay and

ceramic filters.

We are all so grateful for the innovations at DelAgua that make

projects like this possible.