Life in a squatter camp is easy at the best of times. For women it is much harder….they are completely responsible for all the washing of clothes for families. When there is no running water in the home it means that every drop has to be carried from the communal tap hundreds of metres away. This made laundry a laborious and heavy chore.

This has changed considerably for the women of Monwabisi Park since the volunteer students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Massachusetts, USA) designed and built a laundry that uses rainwater harvested from the roof of the youth centre. A simple French drain system channelled the waste water deep into the ground and dispersed it over a wide area.