While traveling in South Africa, a retired British businessman named Trevor Field took note of the burden that collecting safe drinking water for their families placed on women and girls in rural villages. That experience made a big impression on him. The need to gather water, he believed, should not take mothers away from their children or cause young girls to miss school. So he began looking for a solution. In 1989, he licensed the rights to an existing technology that combined a…

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Read more stories by Michele Barry, Lyn Denend, Stefanos Zenios & Amy Lockwood.