Maria Fernanda is one of the 100 winners of the first RISE Challenge
The motivations that drive people to challenge themselves are often deeply rooted in their past. The same also goes for Maria Fernanda, a first-year student from Peru who has designed and built a filter that makes clean water which has made her one of the 100 winners of the first Rise Challenge – a global initiative supported by the Schmidt Futures Foundation and the Rhode Trust to find bright young people who want to contribute to solving global problems and offer them concrete long-term support.
Growing up in Lima, Maria Fernanda experienced food allergies from an early age. Over the years, she discovered that these issues are generally caused to food contamination, particularly fish, which comes from very polluted rivers. So she decided to look into the matter and discovered that many people in Peru do not have access to drinking water at home. In the Amazon rainforest in particular, drinking water is very expensive for indigenous people. They need to boil water in order to drink it but this does not remove heavy metals and it also disperses the minerals in the water.
«I was quite stunned by the fact that in a large city like Lima water could be cleaner and more accessible than in the Amazon forest» says Maria Fernanda.
The filter created by Maria Fernanda works in four stages: first it captures the moisture in the air, condenses it, removes the metal content and finally passes through a filter that balances the Ph and adds the missing mineral salts. Her prototype (see picture below), is now being tested in a real life scenario and is yielding excellent results in a community not far from Maria Fernanda’s parents’ home, where it produces nine litres of clean, easily accessible water every day.
In speaking about the future, Maria Fernanda says that when she arrived in Duino she was sure she wanted to study computer science at university, but now she is having second thoughts. «I love programming, but my experience here is making me question many things». For example, she is now wisely believes she should also study the history of Latin America, because she is convinced that it is essential to understand the her country’s past and the social complexity of Latin American societies before trying to address social problems with technology.
