Alumna is taking water to the masses

Dow BakerEach year, World Water Day is celebrated on March 22. But every day is World Water Day for Camille Dow Baker, MEDes’00.

“Water has always been a key part of my life,” says Dow Baker. While she’s had a strong passion for water personally, a recent career change has made it the centre of her professional life as well. With a relatively new venture, Dow Baker is working to ensure the 1.1 billion people who have limited access to safe and adequate water supplies are able to meet their most basic need.

Dow Baker spent the majority of her career as a petroleum engineer. “I was in the international sector of the oil and gas industry and saw the poverty in the third world nations we were dealing with,” recalls Dow Baker. Those experiences, along with encouragement from her children, convinced Dow Baker to leave her executive position in the oil and gas sector. She enrolled in the U of C’s environmental design program and chose to focus on water and sanitation in developing nations. While at the U of C, she met the professor David Manz who invented the Biosand concrete water filter that would serve as the springboard to her future career.

Dow Baker completed her degree and quickly founded the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST). The non-profit organization reaches out to non-governmental organizations in the developing world to show them that there are many simple, low-cost technologies available to ensure populations have access to an adequate water supply. As the CEO and president of CAWST, Dow Baker is credited for bringing the Biosand water filtration system to more than 20,000 homes in 30 developing nations. Their efforts were recently acknowledged by the United Nations, which added CAWST to the list of top 40 best practices in improving the living environment around the world.

The conception, birth, and growth of CAWST has been a family affair says Dow Baker. Her son created the CAWST Web site and e-mail system, which allows them to keep members of their global village to keep in touch. And Dow Baker’s husband recently followed in her footsteps and left his job in the oil sector to become a full-time volunteer for the organization. And this family that works together also plays together, with water of course. Their cabin on Kootenay Lake is there destination whenever work permits—it’s their own personal water world.

By Sally Jade Powis