Dr Peter Morgan with a prototype for the C-type Zimbabwe Bush Pump in his garden in Harare, 2010
Zimbabwean scientist Dr. Peter Morgan, whom I interviewed for my PhD research, has been awarded the Stockholm Water Prize. Dr. Morgan redesigned the appropriate technology icon the Zimbabwe Bush Pump, and was celebrated as ‘a feminist
dream of an ideal man’ by Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol in their seminal science and technology studies paper on the Bushpump, ‘The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology‘ (2000). You’ll have to read their paper to contexualise that remark!
Article below from http://www.voazimbabwe.com/ (thanks Dad!)
Ray Choto
03.06.2013
WASHINGTON, DC — A Zimbabwean scientist is this year’s Stockholm Water Prize
recipient for his innovations in safe sanitation and clean water supplies.
Dr. Peter Morgan, a former civil servant with the Ministry of Health, will
receive his prize of $150 thousand and a crystal sculpture at a ceremony in
Stockholm during World Water Week in September.
Some of Dr. Morgan’s innovations adapted by the Zimbabwe government include
the Bush Water Pump, the Blair Ventilated Pit Latrine and the upgraded
family well, used mainly by rural communities. The 70-year old researcher
says the technologies he designed are also being used in other African
countries. For each of his technologies, Dr. Morgan says he developed a wide
range of training and educational materials to help communities install and
maintain them without expert supervision.
Dr. Morgan calls the award an “honour” not only for him, but for all the
people of Zimbabwe.
“I think it means the recognition to me personally,” Morgan said. “It means
the recognition of perhaps most of my lifetime’s work, which has been
dedicated to this area. For the country I think it’s important to many of
my colleagues here within the [inaudible] community and within the
government have told me that it means a lot to Zimbabwe, as well, to be
recognized for the work that we have done in this country to actually push
the state of the art forward.”
Dr. Morgan is a naturalized Zimbabwean. He was born in 1943 and educated in
England where he graduated with a Ph.D. in marine biology. He worked as a
chief research officer at the Ministry of Health’s Blair Research Institute
in Harare, now called the National Institute of Health Research. In 1991,
he was awarded member of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). Dr. Morgan
has received many other awards and distinctions, including the International
Inventors Award, the AMCOW Africasan Award for Technical Innovation in
Sanitation, and the Rural Water Supply Network Award for Lifetime Services
to Rural Water Supply.
The Sweden-based Stockholm prize committee, which has selected a winner
every year since 1991, says Dr. Morgan was chosen for what they called his
“unwavering commitment to inventing low-cost practical solutions to provide
access to safe sanitation and clean water to millions of people worldwide.”
The Director of the Stockholm Water Prize, Mr. Jens Berggren, says making
the selection was not easy, but Morgan’s work was special because its
beneficiaries were the poor.
“I think the [inaudible] nomination committee was really impressed that he
has done over the past 40 years,” said Mr. Berggren, “sort of effortlessly
supporting the lives of poor people out there by designing and inventing new
solutions for—especially poor people’s—access to good sanitation and good,
clean drinking water.”
According to the committee’s website, the purpose of the award is to
recognize what it calls the world’s most visionary minds for driving “water
development forward.”