Just look at these beautiful children.

I’ve never had little ones but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand how precious they are. These sweeties live in Laos, a country graced with much beauty … a country that faces many challenges being part of the developing world.

Image: UNDP Lao PDR/Eeva Nyyssonen 

One challenge is access to clean water in remote areas, where villagers regularly get super sick from being forced to use dirty water that carries diseases. Think illnesses like dysentery, gastro-enteritis, cholera and typhoid. Yuck.

A Canberra invention by local charity Abundant Water is helping save lives in Laos with a clay pot filter that, quite literally, transforms dirty water into clean water. If you have a spare $30 you can enable Abundant Water to provide a family with a filter and that includes in Ban Na Dua, a village with a population of 3,000 set in a valley surrounded by stunning limestone mountains about an hour outside of Vientiene.

Ban Na Dua is the target for a campaign Abundant Water has recently launched with StartSomeGood, a crowdsourcing platform for not-for-profits and social entrepreneurs who want to dream big, raise funds, do good.

Abundant Water’s initial goal was to provide 100 families with 100 filters. Thanks to donors quick off the mark, including major supporter ING Direct through its Dreamstarter Program, the goal was quickly exceeded, with 133 filters already designated for Laos.

So now it’s a question of how many more filters can be provided through the Abundant Water—StartSomeGood campaign, which ends next Thursday 3 October 2013.

Sunny Forsyth, CEO and Founder of Abundant Water, brought the amazingly simple yet effective filters to Laos after seeing the technology being tested and developed at Canberra’s own Australian National University. It’s such a simple and inexpensive concept that it’s almost mind boggling, but Sunny knew the technology would work and so he took the very gutsy move of leaving a secure, high-paying job as an engineer with Defence to develop the idea.

The filters are made from natural materials using traditional techniques used in rural villages, so this is grassroots stuff. Local potters are easily trained to make the filters with local clay and a combustible material such as ash. Once formed, the clay pot is fired. Dirty water is transformed into clean water once it passes through the filter.

Abundant Water also stands for sustainability and so teaches villagers to make their own filters with materials they find in their own backyard. “Installing the filters has a remarkable flow-on effect,” says Sunny. “When households see how one family is benefiting, they often want a filter. If enough families become interested, we will train a local potter to make them locally. This empowers communities by giving them knowledge they can use in a sustainable way.”

Sunny tells me an estimated one billion people are without clean drinking water around the world. That is about 1 in every 6 of the world’s population.

We’re spoiled in Canberra. We don’t have to drink dirty water or cook with it or bathe in it. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think twice about how we can help and $30 is all it takes. And, let’s face it, $30 is the price of a glass of wine and a small pizza on a Friday night, or a movie ticket and a dessert and coffee, or a couple of cocktails with friends. So most of us can afford to help. We just need to do it.

Abundant Water encourages Canberrans to dig deep and donate to this precious cause. It’s easy to donate online – just go here http://startsomegood.com/abundantwater or abundantwater.org