J.B. Dill
Age: 19
Hometown: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Project: Simply Pure Water

Growing up in Wisconsin, J.B. felt far removed from the lives of those in rural Africa, but thanks to his parents' insistence on far-flung summer vacations, J.B. was able to experience the rich cultures and often daunting challenges of the developing world. By the age of eight, J.B. had played soccer in Papua New Guinea and earned the right to marry by leaping over bulls in Ethiopia. It was on one of these family adventures that J.B. found his life's passion—clean water.

Visiting rural Ethiopia in the summer of 2002, J.B. was confronted with the fact that many African villages hinge on the availability of potable water. Seeing the destruction caused by waterborne diseases from unsafe drinking water, J.B. decided to do something about it.

His challenge was to invent a filtration system simple and inexpensive enough for widespread use in rural Africa. J.B.'s solution was a filter made by two readily available items in African villages: homemade cloth and charcoal. After two years of research and development, the result was a cheap and accessible water filtration system called Simply Pure Water.

Through an internship with San Francisco-based nonprofit YouthNoise, a partnership with the Ark Foundation and a related grant, he has been able to come closer to implementing his invention. In early June 2007, J.B. departed on a three-week trip to the villages in and around Tamale in Northern Ghana. Hoping to reach around 50,000 villagers, his plan is to camp out and go house-to-house with a group of local volunteers building a sense of trust and partnership with the villagers. “The heart of the project is for the locals to lift themselves out of poverty,” says J.B. He hopes to have the villagers learn the water filtration techniques from him, and then to be able to build, implement, and sustain the skills learned long after he is gone.

While the tangible effects of the project are still in the making, J.B.'s creativity and dedication to tackling the devastating problems of water contamination are a sure thing.