Ashley Murray: wastewater entrepreneur honoured by National Geographic

Published on: 01/07/2011

Ashley Murray, founder and director of Waste Enterprisers in Ghana, has been awarded US$ 10,000 by National Geographic’s 2011 Emerging Explorers Program. The program recognises promising young adventurers, scientists, photographers, and storytellers. In their commendation, National Geographic wrote: "Ashley Murray is working to revolutionize the way the world thinks about waste, but rather than pointing to public health or the environment, she’s motivating governments and the sanitation sector with a persuasive new argument: dollars and cents."

Instead of relying on user fees to finance waste management in low income areas in Ghana, Murray “wants to capture the inherent economic value of waste itself, and use the profits to help pay for sanitation”.The company that Murray set up, Waste Enterprisers, owns, and operates waste-based businesses.

Waste Enterprisers is collaborating with a consortium of research organisations to test using fecal sludge as an industrial fuel.  The project includes a demonstration at a cement factory in Dakar, and it is funded by SPLASH.

In addition, Ashley Murray is the co-Principle Investigator, with Kartik Chandran of Columbia University, on a project to develop a technology for converting fecal sludge into biodiesel along with an accompanying social enterprise model.They were awarded US$ 1.5 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and will work closely with Moses Mensah at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to implement the project in Ghana.

Besides being CEO of Waste Enterprisers, Ashley Murray is a Research Consultant for the International Water Management Institute-Ghana (IWMI).

To learn more about Ashley Murray see her Linkedin profile.

Related web sites:

• National Geographic – Emerging Explorers | profile Ashley Murray
• Waste Enterprisers

Source: National Geographic, 17 May 2011