MindQuest & Partners are Worldbank Development Marketplace Finalists

The German Environmental and Science Communications consulting company MindQuest reached the final round of the World Bank’s Development Marketplace 2006 grant programme. Just above 100 projects were selected from ca. 2500 applications.

“This is in itself a great achievement”, says Author and Geographer Stefan Thiesen, founder of MindQuest. “The project is proposed via WECF – Women in Europe for a Common Future, in cooperation with the German Energy and Water consultancy WIP-Munich.”

The proposed project addresses the problem of increasing freshwater salination in the Aral Sea region in Uzbekistan. “The local people are poor and cannot afford to purchase bottled water – if it is available at all. At the same time the water infrastructure is in a very bad condition. Management and maintenance have been poor after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The local population increasingly suffers from severe medical problems, largely resulting from polluted drinking water and poor nutrition.”

Dr. Thiesen proposed the introduction of a modified solar desalination approach, utilizing classical solar stills that are optimized for continental climates.

“The classic solar still is a proven and tested technology, but under the conditions in Uzbekistan it only is useful during the hot Summer months and, to a lesser extent, during warm and sunny days in Spring and Autumn. During about half of the year temperatures are too low to operate the stills – this January the temperatures dropped to below minus 20° C in some parts of the region” says Thiesen.

The new still will introduce transparent insulation and operate with an optimized detached condensation chamber. According to “It will have no moving parts, and no electronics are required. In addition the goal is to train locals not only in operation and management of the system, but make the construction plans public domain, so that other people in regions with similar conditions can reproduce the system.”

The proposal will be presented by Michael Papapetrou (Science Consultant, WIP), Gero Fedtke (WECF coordinator) and Gulbahar Izentaeva (director of the Uzbek NGO Mehriban) during the “Development Marketplace Conference in Washington, from May 6, 2006.

The project would be co-financed and organized by the Dutch Government and the German NGO “Water for the Children of the Aral Sea” and take place within the research framework of the TMF project “Tapping Resources – Gebruik de Kracht van Vrouwen voor een Duurzame Ontwikkeling” (Use Women’s Strength for a Sustainable Development).


MindQuest offers a one stop project based environmental science, policy and communications consulting service, with specializations in: Energy, Water, Integrated Coastal & Protected Area Management, Climate Change Impact Assessment and Mitigation, Rapid Impact Overviews (RIOs) for many situations.

Contact: http://www.MindQuest.info , Stefan Thiesen, Ph.D., Werner Str. 203, D-59379 Selm

This release was published on openPR.