Isla Urbana - City of Rain

My name is Enrique Lomnitz, I was born in Mexico City to an immigrant family and was raised between Mexico and the US, where I studied Industrial Design, after which I returned home with the goal of getting my city to start harvesting rainwater. For the past 11 years, I have been working in communities on the outskirts of the city and in remote rural villages, installing and teaching people to use rainwater harvesters. I have founded and worked with several projects, all focused on sustainable development for marginalized communities. My life and work are focused on the intersections of sustainability, poverty, water access, and community. I am an Ashoka fellow, MIT Tech Review Innovator, and UBS Global Visionary. My goal is to make a significant contribution to sustainable development in my country.  

Our city, like thousands around the world, is quickly running out of water. Millions of residents are experiencing increasingly precarious access, low quality water, and prolonged periods with no supply. Violence and social unrest around water-scarcity have become common. Beyond the city, 10 million people in Mexico lack access to any sort of water supply system. Low-income populations are disproportionately affected.

We are working to build a decentralized model of autonomous water supply, capable of improving water access where it is most needed in a fully sustainable way, by installing rainwater harvesting systems in as many houses as possible. 

We seek to elevate humanity by working with the most water scarce, marginalized, populations so they can achieve resilience and self-sufficiency in their water access, reduce dependence on a system that has consistently left them behind, and instead become a vanguard of new, sustainable, local water management they can control themselves.

We are working to solve a problem of worldwide consequence that has tormented Mexico for decades: How do we sustainably supply water to the population, and close the inequity gap with those persistently left behind. 

Over 10 million people in Mexico, and 780 million worldwide, lack access to any water supply infrastructure. In Mexico City, over 250,000 people have no connection to the water grid, and millions more receive intermittent, often polluted water, a few days per week or less.

Grossly unsustainable management practices, population growth, disregard for marginalized groups, and a lack of innovation and creative thinking in infrastructure have put the city in a deep crisis, landing it on the list of the worlds 10 most likely to run out of water.

Ironically, Mexico City is built in a naturally water-rich area. It was founded on an island in a vast lake, and receives an abundant 300-500 inches of rain per year. Yet for 400 years, infrastructure projects have focused on draining the lake, and immediately channeling the rainwater into a combined sewage system that flushes it out towards the ocean.

The result is a desiccating landscape, collapsing aquifers, and less and less clean water for the population.  

Our project seeks to detonate and promote the widescale adoption of Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) in Mexico City, and the country as a whole, in order to build sustainable and resilient water access, capable of reaching places where conventional water supply models have so far failed. 

We do this by working on several fronts: designing and installing RWH systems adapted to the varied social and architectural contexts found in Mexico; working directly with water-scarce communities, teaching how to harvest, treat, and store rainwater; creating content and communications initiatives to place RWH in the public imagination and agenda; working with universities to study and research RWH best practices and potential; and working directly with local and state governments to design and implement RWH programs and policy.

Much of our work involves getting RWH on the public agenda, and then designing and/or implementing programs, in collaboration with local governments and foundations, that install rain capture systems in homes and schools in highly water-precarious communities, teaching the population to use them effectively, and then supporting them over a few years in order to firmly establish the knowledge of best practices and ensure long term adoption. 

Our work serves low-income neighborhoods in the southern and eastern edges of Mexico City, and remote, mostly indigenous, communities throughout the country.

These communities experience both socio-economic marginalization, and chronic water shortages. About 70% of the people we work with are women. 

Our project is based on maintaining a close understanding of the realities the communities we work with face. The project was founded by myself and a small group of people who went to live in a water scarce, low-income neighborhood in the south of the city, where we lived for several years, collaborating directly with our neighbors to fully understand the realities of living without water, and to design RWH systems adapted to that context. Our installers come almost exclusively from these same areas, three of them are now partners and directors in the organization, overseeing all implementations. We have lived in and spent great amounts of time in some of the most water-scarce areas in the city, and remote villages where the situation is even worse.  These populations have been persistently underserved by the government, and have precarious infrastructure at best. Our goal is to work with them so they can supply their own water autonomously

Deteriorating water supply is a huge global problem. It deeply affects low income populations, and women particularly, forcing them to spend great amounts of time and money procuring a minimal supply. Depending on derelict or overwhelmed governments for a scarce amount of often polluted water degrades peoples’ health, quality of life, and dignity.  Building the knowledge and infrastructure to self-supply their own water is an empowering and emancipating experience, elevating peoples’ quality of life, sense of self-reliance and resilience. Something profound happens when you suffer water scarcity and learn to use water that is literally falling from the sky

I was born in Mexico City, and studied Industrial Design in the US, but was uninterested in conventional product development, which I saw as contributing to consumerism and environmental degradation. I teamed up with a fellow student and we began visiting and interviewing people in working-class parts of our city, looking for big problems to address. Water scarcity came up continuously, and as we learned about the history and current situation with water, we became convinced that here was the great, looming, crisis we were going to face.  

Our City has a dual problem: potable water access is deteriorating quickly as aquifers go dry, while simultaneously, intense rains overwhelm the sewage system and flood huge areas. Every projection of the future we heard was grim. We believed a paradigm shift was necessary if somehow Mexico City was to become sustainable and capable of providing everyone with water. It seemed logical that widespread rainwater harvesting for domestic use made sense in this context. We installed a pilot system with a family who had always suffered water scarcity, and they became fully water-autonomous for 8 months that year. We decided to found Isla Urbana to multiply this experience to mass scale

My family migrated to Mexico as exiles from several wars and conflicts in southern and eastern Europe in the mid 20thcentury. Mexico gave us a home and a place to live in peace. My grandmother was an anthropologist who focused on how marginalized people survive in extremely difficult situations. We have always had a strong sense of debt to and love for this country. I became fiercely interested in sustainability and ecology in my late teens. I saw this as my fight, the area where I would try to contribute to the world. My interests in sustainability and marginalized communities, and my wish to do something for Mexico, converged when I began to understand the scale and depth of the water crisis. I believed this was a problem worth devoting myself to, one that could only be solved if enough creative people threw themselves into with every idea and bit of energy they had. After years of work, having gotten to know the city and country more deeply than I could have imagined and experienced it in complete joy and sometimes horrible difficulty, I am more certain than ever that what we are doing is right and completely necessary

I believe we are uniquely well positioned to achieve our goals of detonating the widescale adoption of rainwater harvesting in Mexico, and achieving a paradigm shift in thinking around water infrastructure. 

Our team is completely dedicated and has a very broad set of skills. We are designers, engineers, plumbers, anthropologists, teachers, urbanists, and social workers. Our parents were PhDs, subsistence farmers, and everything in between. I believe the whole spectrum of Mexican society is represented in our team. This brings a great diversity of ideas and thoughts to the project, and we have found that we can connect to, and work as equals with, almost anyone in the country. On a given day, we may be on the radio with a top news anchor, meeting with a tribal government in a community a four-hours’ hike from the nearest road, and training plumbers in one of Mexico City’s densest urban neighborhoods. I have found few people in the country who have built empathic networks that cut across as many sectors and classes as we have, This has given us a deep understanding of the reality we are working to change, and, I believe, it gives our voice weight.  Perhaps most importantly, I think we have clearly proven that what we do works. Rainwater harvesting really does significantly improve peoples’ lives in places that have suffered persistently from water scarcity. As the crisis gets worse, I believe having a solution, and the means to communicate it, is the greatest guarantor of success

We’ve faced many forms of adversity, from fundraising during economic crises, to being repeatedly subjected to violent robberies. I think our biggest challenges, however, have come from working with governments plagued by corruption. 

We once lost a crucial project we had worked on for a year because we refused to give a lower-level bureaucrat a 3,000-dollar bribe. The project represented much of our expected yearly revenue, and losing it was an enormous moral and economic blow to our organization, but we wanted to be able to honestly say that we have never bought or work with bribes, and so we refused. We have sadly faced similar situations since, but this was the first time that corruption seriously hurt us. The experience was a sort of test of fire. We consciously used it to show ourselves that we would not go down that road, and it became an important milestone in building our organizational culture. That year was economically hard, but creatively excellent. We put all of our focus and energy on new projects and ideas. Our design, communications, and sales departments started taking shape, and we came out of the crisis with a diversity of new work and alliances

When the project first started, I rented a room in sort of boarding house in a low-income neighborhood, across the street from our first rainwater system. It was rustic and hard to get to, but I was always working in the community and kept the doors open. After a few months, people began hearing about it and coming to see. To my surprise, a few of them returned with suitcases, rented rooms themselves, and moved in to help. Eventually, there were 8 or 9 people living there, all working to put up rainwater systems. That’s how Isla Urbana got started, as a sort of community united on a mission.   I’ve never felt comfortable talking about myself as a leader. I didn’t set out to be one, and accepting that role has required hard internal work. I don’t like telling people what to do, and prefer working with them to align and integrate their passions into our goals. At my best, I’m in constant conversation with the team, listening, trying to help direct their focus, and finding strategies that play off each members’ strengths. When I’m in that space, I find that people simply join me, and we then work together

Rainwater harvesting (RWH) has been widely practiced in different forms for at least 6000 years. Several companies design and sell RWH systems and components throughout the world. Our work is unique in its focus, goals, and the strategies we have developed to realize them. 

Our mission is to increase water sustainability and resilience in places, especially cities, that are at high risk of suffering serious water crises. We are not focused on making and selling RWH systems for their own sake. Instead, we seek to promote and advance the adoption of the practice of harvesting rain. Our work involves a multi-layered strategy combining the design, sale, and installation of systems, generating practical research and knowledge on RWH best practices, teaching people how to design and install systems, influencing public policy to support and encourage the practice, and generating awareness and interest in the general population. 

This approach has allowed us to grow and self-finance ourselves as a products and services provider, but has also put us at the forefront of the conversation on water sustainability in academic and policy circles in Mexico. 

We seek to detonate a vibrant market in alternative water technologies, capable of reaching different potential populations that need them. We train other companies and organizations in RWH best practices, in order to increase the number of people working professionally to address the water crisis, we work with governments to design policy and programs, and we execute RWH projects at many scales and throughout the country.

Currently:

People directly served with improved water access in their home or school through rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems we have directly installed: aprox. 170,000

People directly served with improved water access at home or school through RWH systems installed by other organizations through projects or programs we designed or advised: aprox. 30,000

In one year:

People directly served with improved water access in their home or school through rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems we have directly installed: aprox. 200,000

People directly served with improved water access at home or school through RWH systems installed by other organizations through projects or programs we designed or advised: aprox. 120,000

In five years:

People directly served with improved water access in their home or school through rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems we have directly installed: aprox. 500,000

People directly served with improved water access at home or school through RWH systems installed by other organizations through projects or programs we designed or advised: aprox. 1,000,000

Our work so far in Mexico has succeeded in placing Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) firmly in Mexico City’s policy agenda. A citywide Rainwater Harvesting program which we designed has been established and is underway, and new regulations requiring RWH for new buildings is coming out this year. This represents the fulfillment of a goal we have worked towards for several years.

This year, our goals include: 

• -Establishing our first significant excursion out of Mexico through a partnership with a Panamanian organization working with the UN-FAO and Panamanian Government
• -Establishing 10 regional alliances with organizations in various parts of Mexico to carry our RWH projects in various other states and cities
• -Developing a strong private-sector service operation to install RWH systems in higher-income areas
• -expanding our work with schools installing RWH systems and WASH education activities
• -Scaling our work in rural indigenous communities

In the next 5 years:

• -We hope that in five years RWH will have become fully accepted as an infrastructure option for water supply throughout Mexico, with local and state governments, companies, and organizations implementing RWH systems throughout the country.
• -We want to be working throughout Latin America to replicate the experience.
• -We want to integrate reforestation and landscape-scale water management into our work with remote communities.

This year, the Covid-19 pandemic is causing a deep economic recession in Mexico. This means government funds to establish new programs are likely to be very limited. Expanding private-sector implementations is also likely to be affected by the economic situation.

As we expand into other parts of Mexico, and beyond to Latin America, our organization is likely to require skills and knowledge to manage and administer a more diverse and complex operation. This will put a strain on our current capacities, and likely require finding and partnering with new people who can fill them.

The populations who benefit the most from our work are those in areas suffering high levels of water scarcity. These areas are generally also very low-income, and the people have very little money to invest. This means that government subsidies are often needed to implement projects. Serving mostly bottom of the pyramid populations imposes significant challenges in the creation of business models resilient to recessions and sometimes fickle government priorities. 

The Covid pandemic has created great economic pressure, but has also heightened the urgency of solving water scarcity for health reasons. It has greatly increased interest in local and autonomous solutions for food and water access. We are working to position rainwater harvesting within this context through increased emphasis on communications, and by quickly developing projects aligned with Covid alleviation goals and focusing on areas where water scarcity coincides with high infection rates.

We are developing new alliances and partnerships with organizations to help build the capacities we need to extend our work beyond the areas covered so far. We are working with lawyers, other NGOs, and consulting with people on expanding operations beyond our area. We have been doing careful analysis of the problems we have faced in the past, and designing strategies to make sure we can avoid them in the future and to anticipate challenges we believe we will face. We are piloting our first foray into central America, setting up the necessary logistics and legal know-how to export products and know-how.

We have been exploring various potential strategies to facilitate work in low income areas without government support, exploring potential credit-based strategies, and establishing collaborations with international and national foundations and institutions to fund programs. We have been putting a lot of effort into co-financing strategies, and designing ways to lower costs and maximize the value-for-price of all our services. 

We are working with several organizations, the following are a few of our current, active collaborations:

UNDP- Designing and implementing strategies and programs to achieve water coverage in extremely remote indigenous communities

Local governments in various states and municipalities in Mexico- Designing and/or implementing rainwater harvesting policy and programs (Districts in Mexico City, Guanajuato, Nayarit, Queretaro, Veracruz)

Cantaro Azul (Water and Sanitation NGO in Chiapas, Mexico)- Designing and implementing rainwater harvesting and hand washing stations in schools in Chiapas

Agua Capital and Coca Cola Foundation- implementing water Access projects for school communities in southern Mexico City

UBS Global Visionaries Program- consulting on strategies for international expansion

Panama Rain Water- Business partnership to establish rainwater harvesting programs in Panama

Mexican Association of Rainwater Harvesting Systems- development of manuals, education resources, and policy initiatives

Isla Urbana Distributors Network- group of companies and NGOs in various states which we have formed to co-develop strategies to implement rainwater harvesting projects in various states in the country

Our business model has a few different modalities, depending on the kind of client and project.

One of our main lines of work involves contracting directly with local governments to serve low-income, water scarce communities in their areas. Local governments spend huge sums of money providing water where the city’s central water authority fails to reach. Many districts in Mexico City spend millions of dollars a year subsidizing water truck deliveries, for example. They also face direct and often intense social pressure from communities that receive little or no water from the grid, or get highly contaminated water. These local governments hire us directly to design and/or implement rainwater harvesting programs in the most critically water-stressed neighborhoods.

We do direct sale of rainwater harvesting systems and sustainable water management technologies to end-users. This line of our work is mostly directed towards middle- and upper-income households who happen to be in water scarce areas, who wish to become more sustainable, or who pay high water bills. We also work with a network of distributors we have built to install systems in other parts of the country. 

We work with national and international foundations and organizations to fund specific projects in particularly difficult contexts, such as remote indigenous communities. 

We are already financially sustainable, in the sense that all of our work is funded through a combination of grants and the sale of products and services, and we have successfully operated since our founding entirely with the revenue we have generated. We have not raised investment capital, but would consider doing so if it becomes necessary for expansion. Our greater concern is in developing greater financial resilience, since we have often found ourselves in situations where a few large projects account for a large proportion of our revenue. We are working hard on building a larger portfolio of diverse small and medium projects that collectively generate sufficient revenue to maintain the team.

We have generated revenue from the beginning, and have always reinvested profits to grow and maintain the organization. We started extremely small, operating with tiny grants, donations, and sales, and have grown over the years entirely financed in this way. 

Direct contracts with local governments have made up around 60-70% of our revenue over the years, with the remainder coming from grants, donations, and direct-to-user sales. I prefer not sharing financials on this platform, but we have directly installed approximately 20,000 rainwater harvesting systems since our founding, and have designed or advised programs that have installed a further 3 or 4 thousand systems by other organizations. We have never received capital investments, and have no debt, the entirety of our work and growth has been revenue driven, with profits reinvested into the organization. 

We seek to raise about 5 million USD in grants over the next few years to fund the implementation of projects in indigenous communities, particularly to establish sustainable, autonomous water coverage for the entirety of the Indigenous Huichol Nation in western Mexico, and for select other communities with very high water scarcity and in extreme poverty. 

We have never sought equity investment, but are interested in doing so now in order to finance the diversification and expansion of our work to other parts of the country, and into Central and South America. We would like to raise 5 million USD to fund this over the next 2 years.  

Our expenses this year are expected to be about 1 million USD, covering mainly salaries, operational expenses, and materials

Our organization was founded to detonate the widespread adoption of Rainwater Harvesting in Mexico City. We began extremely small, and slowly developed our proofs-of-concept, business models, and our team. When we began, rainwater harvesting was nowhere near being considered as a serious part of the city’s water management strategy. There were no precedents to prove the potential viability of installing domestic rainwater systems on a massive scale as decentralized infrastructure, and neither the technical, nor any implementation models and strategies, had been developed that could make it deployable at large scale. 

Over the past years, we have successfully developed and executed these technologies and implementations, and have demonstrated the positive impacts that doing so has on water sustainability, resilience, and access for the areas that most need it. Rainwater Harvesting now has broad acceptance, and features prominently in Mexico City’s water management public policy. 

 We are applying for the Elevate Prize because we believe we have reached a place where we need both economic support and mentorship to take this experience to its next level, and start extending and replicating it in other cities and countries

We have been a very organic team, growing and learning as we go. All the shareholders are founders and directly involved in the organization. We have accrued a huge amount of practical knowledge, and have been successful at building a project from the ground up. We are now at a point, however, where we need outside help to consolidate the organization and structure it for continued growth and expansion. We have gaps in our capacities that relate to financing and structuring for the next step up in scale.