Caminos de Agua (Caminos) is dedicated to creating access to safe and affordable water for marginalized communities in the Northern part of the state of Guanajuato and across Mexico using bottom-up innovation. Founded in 2011, Caminos is providing both immediate solutions for water-stressed regions as well as strategies to counter the root causes. In particular, they have drawn attention to the issue of chemical pollution from the overexploitation of groundwater, largely due to the rapid expansion of the export-agricultural industry in our semi-arid environment, and its devastating effects on communities’ health.
On the one hand, Caminos is delivering pioneering low-cost technologies that enable entire communities facing water scarcity and hard-to-remove chemical contaminants to implement customized systems to collect and purify water. Currently available solutions to provide clean water are not affordable for rural communities or are inadequate for our arid region. Through a wide network of grassroots partners, Caminos motivates communities to organize and then trains and involves community members to design and build systems that are appropriate to their local context, followed by long-term monitoring and evaluation to track progress and iterate solutions. These field-tested technologies are designed under an “open source” philosophy, meaning they are made publicly available to anyone in the world suffering from similar water challenges who can learn from our designs and data to develop locally-appropriate solutions.
On the other hand, Caminos is taking the lead on one of the biggest barriers to promoting sustainable management of water resources: lack of information and transparency. Caminos has developed a comprehensive education program for communities, schools, NGOs, and governments to raise awareness about local and global water issues. Additionally, they create low-cost methods to produce more accurate, detailed, and updated data on water issues at community and national levels, offering this data openly to ensure informed decision-making by stakeholders across sectors.
To date, Caminos has served more than 30,000 people, mostly in Mexico, but also in Haiti, Colombia, and Guatemala. Caminos is particularly active in low-income rural and peri-urban areas facing extreme water stress or excessive chemical contamination, specifically arsenic and fluoride, in their water supplies. The organization is now increasingly focused on building networks to increase the engagement of other stakeholders to create collaborative systemic solutions. Today, Caminos is working on local, state and federal levels to improve water management and climate change resiliency, as well as educating other organizations in the field to monitor water quality and replicate their systems. Caminos is scaling solutions by leveraging a unique combination of appropriate technology, community-led approaches, and collaboration with a multiplicity of partners in a notoriously fragmented sector.
The Amistad Canada–Caminos de Agua ‘Clean Water Access Project’ will provide Rainwater Harvesting Systems and related training and education to one of the water-challenged rural communities in the municipality of San Miguel de Allende.
