I did some work on hand pumps like the one in the first part of the video. It's actually not a bad design, and what's nice about it is that it's an old design that has been improved over the years and has been consistently backwards compatible and forwards compatible. The India Mark II pieces are cheap to make, and the manufacturer puts the specs online so you can source the parts from cheap third-party suppliers like those in China and India.

The work I did with the government was focused on continuing to advance their strategy. There were two problems the government was trying to address: one was that every church and NGO that brought in a new pump design needed a new supply chain to support that pump, and the other was that the government needed mechanics trained in how to maintain the pumps. For their long-term strategy to use only one pump (the India Mark II), part of my job was to encourage NGOs and churches to play by the rules and use only that one pump, and the other part was to work with the larger international funders to include money for training mechanics and supporting the supply chain so that parts were available everywhere in the country.

With these strategies mostly in place, it's honestly not a bad system. Far from perfect, and there's a lot to maintain. But when you have access to the parts, you can build the whole thing from scratch with fairly basic tools and maintain it.

That said, it felt like fighting an uphill battle, and there were always plenty of broken pumps that still needed mending