How mobiles may help Africa.

The main way of retaining water in Africa is by the use of a hand pump. However it is thought that at any one time over 30% are broken and out of action.

This means that there are alot of people without access to water which is worrying due to the dependence that we as humans have on a resource taken for granted in places such as the U.K.  It was only last week that a letter was sent detailing the fact that water would be turned off between the hours of midnight and 5am for repairs and so many people were complaining even though they had no need for that water and those repairs are maintaining our high standards of living! People in Africa are lucky if they have water that is semi clean for a few hours a day.  

Any how that is besides the point, it is though that currently more Africans have access to mobile networking facilities than do to advanced clean water systems. The latest idea is to fit hand pumps with mobile transmitters that send a signal when any one device is broken by measuring the flow and movement of water and the hand pump itself. If faulty a signal is to be sent to a head office where a mechanic will be sent out. 

Now if you ask me this is all well and good but yet again another unsustainable idea that we have come up with. if they have access to mobile networking then surely it would be better to equip someone in each village with the skills to fix the pump and a hand held device to receive the alerts these skills could then be transferred from generation and give them more skills to retain jobs with in life. 

We need to stop encouraging a dependence outside of communities and first start to create complex communities that are completely self-sufficient in sustaining high levels of well being and can score high on the HDI (human development index). 

However although i have seen the darker side to this article i believe it is an improvement and the target for meeting the millennium development goal for access to clean water has already been met! that is 2.5 years ahead of target! However, we cannot stop here as over 200million people still have no access and there are still many more goals to be reached including the rights to basic sanitation. 

First module of OU

So it seems it has practically been since forever that i last wrote a blog which also means it has been forever since i left college!!

Since finishing college last year i have moved house 3 times and job once...Whilst this is going on i have been doing my first module of my natural science degree, called exploring science.

This module has been compulsory to my degree and is also the base of many more and therefore contained very little earth science based subjects and instead a lot of very intense Chemistry and Physics--which does actually underpin an awful lot of everything within our surroundings.

This first module has taken me 9 months and is the equivalent to half a year at uni. I am currently waiting to see whether or not i have passed the last piece of work i submitted, thus whether or not i passed the module.

I have just started another module, this is only worth 10 credits, the frozen planet. As you can imagine from the title the module is closely linked to the t.v. series.

As i go through this module i hope to look more into the issues raised and therefore compose blogs about them.