Teens’ award-winning water saver
They’re waterwise beyond their years! A trio of young go-getters have designed a system for conserving SA’s scarce resource
IT WAS his big moment. He’d been flown to Durban and there, waiting to shake his hand, were President Jacob Zuma and minister of water and sanitation Nomvula Mokonyane. They were eager to meet Moses Mhlwana, who at just 18 years old had helped come up with a genius invention that might help put an end to South Africa’s water woes. But the excitement wasn’t mutual. Moses – who, along with two friends, had just come first out of 500 entries in the youth division of the Hack4Water contest – felt distinctly lukewarm about meeting the politicians.
“I wasn’t really excited because they aren’t the kind of people I want to meet,” the teen says bluntly. “I want to meet people like [Facebook trailblazer] Mark Zuckerberg and [Microsoft founder] Bill Gates, and then I’ll be excited.”
Zuckerberg has had a pivotal influence on Moses’ life. When he saw the movie The Social Network, about how he came to develop Facebook, it changed everything.
“I saw what lies behind everything I see; the websites – there are codes behind it. That’s when I was interested in coding,” he says. Moses’ decision to learn coding led to him teaming up with two other young go-getters, Njabulo Sibiya (17) and Ndumiso Cossa (19), to develop a clever innovation that puts a stop to water wastage.
It’s called the Smart Tank and consists of a water tank and a touchpad. People can use it to input how much water they need then the tank measures it out exactly. With dams running dry in many parts of South Africa you can understand why their innovation is being met with so much fanfare.
The three brainboxes identified a problem and together worked out a way to solve it. It took hundreds of hours of work and entailed learning to do the coding of a hi-tech digital touchscreen all by themselves – a tall order, but they refused to give up.
MOSES and Njabulo, who are in matric at Bokgoni Technical Secondary School in Atteridgeville, Pretoria, have known each other since they were in primary school. For the past two years they’ve spent their holidays attending the Geekulcha Vacation Work Programme in Pretoria, which teaches high school learners information and communication technology (ICT) skills at no cost.
“They taught us how to create electronic devices, how to build websites [and] electronic components, how to create mobile apps and how to come up with tech ideas so we can open up tech businesses,” Njabulo explains.
While taking part in the programme they met Ndumiso, who told them about seeing people without a drop of water.
“Ndumiso told us he’d visited a township in Mpumalanga and had seen how they struggled to get water. Every time they have to wait for a truck to come and refill their tanks. Some days they even come late. So we thought we should try to find something that could solve that problem,” Moses says.
Over the September school holidays the three teamed up to develop a prototype for the tank. But their initial design had flaws – it had an analogue keypad that the
team wasn’t happy with and the tank created a lot of spillage, the very problem they were trying to solve.
The team carried on working on the project and came up with an improved design. This one included a feature that prevented wastage and was equipped with a digital touchscreen they had to learn to code by trial and error.
“The challenge came in where we had to disassemble it [the first tank] and build another one,” Moses says. With the new tank, if you open the tap and the water spills, not a drop goes to waste because it falls into a basin connected by a pipe to an extra tank, which can be used for other purposes, such as gardening.
In addition to offering a solution to township residents spilling when collecting their water in buckets, the tank is also aimed at farmers for irrigation. It has sensors that detect the moisture levels in the soil and the tank automatically releases the correct amount of water when needed.
It was a marathon undertaking. In order to develop the tank the young boffins had to learn how to use a water pump and build the system’s circuit – including micro controllers and ultrasonic and moisture sensors.
But they got there in the end and it wasn’t long before their brilliant design was attracting attention. They entered it in the Hack4Water competition, a campaign run by the SA department of water and sanitation in partnership with Open Government Partnership SA to find the best hacks for the country’s water and sanitation challenges.
And from hundreds of entries in the youth category theirs emerged victorious. Moses got to fly to Durban to collect their award. It was a big adventure for him as it was his first time on a plane.
On his return he split the R15 000 prize money with his teammates. But this isn’t the end of their story. Moses and Njabulo still have big plans.
WHEN he was younger Njabulo dreamt of becoming president of South Africa some day. But after he turned 13 his elder brother, Smangaliso (26), who studied electronics and telecommunications, introduced him to coding. By his first year of high school Njabulo was hooked and was learning a number of coding languages.
Moses, on the other hand, initially aspired to becoming a doctor. He was being raised by his grandmother Novukile (66) in Mount Frere in the Eastern Cape and believed if he was to achieve his dream he would have to move to the big city to finish his schooling.
“I never saw any doctors in the Eastern Cape,” he says. “I used to complain about how poor the education is in rural areas.”
Novukile eventually sent him to live with his uncle Xolani Mhlwana (49) in Soshanguve, Pretoria. It was Xolani who introduced Moses to computers. Moses initially enjoyed playing games but after a while it dawned on him there was more he could do with computers.
Last year he and Njabulo took part in the Unisa Hackathon, a coding competition. Even though they were the youngest entrants and were competing against university students and seasoned hackers, they came second.
Now with the Hack4Water victory under their belts they have more ambitious plans. They intend using the prize money to buy components for their next project.
Between dreaming and coding, the teen innovators are a lot busier than most kids their age. When they finish school they hope to study computer science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
But first they have to get through matric – and they won’t be satisfied with anything less than four As each.
‘I want to meet people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates’