Clean water for Tibet

End Date: May 1, 2013 12:00 AM

UC Berkeley has collaborative work with TVP (Tibetan Village Project) initiative to help TVP's latest endeavor of bringing clean water to rural villages in Tibet. The goal is to design a simple, cost effective and easy to maintain home-based water storage and purification system.

A handpicked group of UC Berkeley students, lead by researcher Alexandra Rasch, will travel to Tibet in Summer 2013 to test and implement the water storage and purification design. During the visit further testing and gathering of information/data will be done to start work on a more advanced solution to clean water: a plumbing/irrigation system. Data and information on Tibet in general is hard to find because of Chinese regulation, which is why travel is an important part to obtaining more data for the future of this project. Thus any contributions to the cost of travel and materials will be highly appreciated and influential in the future of clean water for Tibet. With our design budgeted at $500 US dollars for water systems for 3 villages, a donation of $100 will essentially provide clean water for a home of 8 people.


To increase the success and sustainability of the project, TVP does not just give the purifiers away. Local families invest in the filter to create a sense of ownership over the project. While the goal is to make clean water accessible to rural villages in Tibet, the greater goal is to empower the Tibetans with the establishment of clean water and help alleviate poverty. This project is to provide an immediate solution to the lack of clean water, which is a main cause of the major medical problems in Tibet: stunting due to malnutrition and death due to dysentery. However, the future of this project lies in the travel aspect of it.

From this project, Tibetan Village Project hopes to create a new source of business in Tibet around the final design. This will fuel economy and alleviate poverty while efforts in a bigger and more concrete business around water purification in regards to a plumbing/irrigation system is worked on after this project.