International Academy Student Helps Solve Haiti Water Issues: Video

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MI — A product developed by a Bloomfield Hills teen and three of her peers in California to address the water shortage in Haiti has caught the attention of philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates.

Sanya Verma, 15, a junior at Bloomfield HIlls’ International Academy helped develop the technology and found a company, VivaFlow, at MIT Launch, The Birmingham Eccentric reports. She was among 70 students nationwide chosen for the four-week summer entrepreneurship program held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge.

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Verma and Californians Kai Lin, Mihika Nadig and Tommy Yang spent the first few days of the confab brainstorming ideas, then narrowed their project down to one that focused on the problems of Haiti after discussing the water scarcity problem in more general terms.

“We were talking about the process of turning saltwater into freshwater — and so I came up with the crazy idea of making a system to turn saltwater into freshwater in a water bottle,” Verma told the newspaper.

The scaled up the idea to create a potable water system that turns saltwater into freshwater on a large scale. It is being incubated at MIT after the team got quotes from a manufacturer in China, who agreed to make it for $30. VivaFlow would sell the filtration systems to non-governmental organizations working in Haiti for $45.

Targeting underprivileged communities is one of the differences that separates VivaFlow from other manufacturers of large-scale water filtration systems. After reaching out to nonprofit foundations Verma and her team received a letter of intent from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

VivaFlow has started a campaign on Indiegogo to raise the $10,000 — $2,000 for research and development and another $8,000 for manufacturing and distribution — needed to get the company off the ground.

“We hope our technology can provide relief day to day and during the aftermath of natural disasters, when obtaining water can be a primary difficulty,” the crowdfunding web page reads.

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