A Soccer Field Is Designed to Multitask and Pump Clean Water to Poor Regions

As kids from several Los Angeles Boys and Girls Clubs tangled over a soccer ball one recent summer day, few casual observers could have guessed that the facility surrounding them was a mock-up of a nonprofit project whose purpose is far more complex than recreation.

The soccer stadium, with enough bleachers to seat 1,000 people, was a full-size model of a project designed not only as a place to play but also as a community center and facility that can collect rain and turn it into clean drinking water. The idea is to build such play spaces in parts of the world where people die from drinking unsafe water.

The model was unveiled this summer at an event at the Los Angeles port arranged by the project’s key backer, the Annenberg Foundation, which has given $450,000 to the project. The first working example of the Pitch: Africa project (“pitch” is a British term for a playing field) will be built in South Africa over the next year. Pitches in Ethiopia and Tanzania may soon follow.

Constructed from low-cost materials that may include shipping containers, bamboo, and steel, some structures will also feature classrooms and health clinics built underneath the bleachers.

“Every once in a while something comes to the fore that captures your attention in a new and different way, and this was an example of that,” says Leonard Aube, executive director of the Annenberg Foundation. “We really liked the cross-cutting component of it.”

Capturing Rain Water

The project works when rain falls on the soccer pitch and seeps through a filter into a tank under the stadium. When people are ready to use the water, it undergoes a second filtration process before it is distributed for drinking, cooking, washing, and farming. One pitch can capture 1.8 million liters of water in parts of the world where it rains five feet annually, enough to meet the needs of 1,000 people for a year.

Created by two designers, Jane Harrison and David Turnbull, the pitch capitalizes on soccer’s beloved status in Africa and other parts of the world.

“Water is, in a sense, an unusual resource; it can both unite and divide people,” says Mr. Turnbull, who, with Ms. Harrison, runs the Princeton, N.J., nonprofit group Atopia Research. “So rather than just seeing water as a technical problem, it’s a social and community issue.”

To help build and oversee the pitch projects, Mr. Turnbull and Ms. Harrison’s group will work with nonprofit organizations in each of the locations where a field is constructed. The two say they tried to keep the design simple so the facility would be easy to maintain.

Ned Breslin, chief executive of the nonprofit group Water for People, in Denver, says the concept is exciting. But he foresees a few challenges.

The project costs far more—between $125,000 and $250,000 per facility—than other water technologies. Whether the pitch inadvertently hurts existing water-collection efforts like aquifers will need to be studied. So will the facility’s ability to hold up over time, he says.

But Mr. Breslin can’t help but chuckle about the cleverness of the idea. In southern Africa, where he lived for many years, it was rare that a town or village would decide to put a borehole or other water-collection point on a soccer field, because they loved the sport so. Now, Mr. Breslin says, “they can still have their soccer pitch and get their water.”