Child’s Play

A solution to a sub-Saharan public health crisis is also…a merry-go-round.

Summer 2007

Gideon Mendel/Corbis for Proto

CHILD’S PLAY is the unlikely solution to a sub-Saharan public health crisis: the high incidence of disease transmitted by dirty water. With each rotation of a PlayPump’s colorful merry-go-round, children draw clean water from 330-foot-deep wells into 660-gallon storage tanks that feature space for advertisements and public health messages about such concerns as HIV/AIDS prevention and proper hand-washing. The ad revenues fund the maintenance of the $14,000 system.

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