Ron Rivera

Ronald Rivera (August 22, 1948 – September 3, 2008) was an American activist of Puerto Rican descent who is best known for promoting an inexpensive ceramic water filter developed in Guatemala by the chemist Fernando Mazariegos and used to treat gray water in impoverished communities and for establishing community-based factories to produce the filters around the world.

Early years Rivera was born in the Bronx borough of New York City, of Puerto Rican parents. He was raised in both New York City and Puerto Rico. Rivera graduated from The World University in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He also studied at the School for International Training.

Rivera worked with the Peace Corps in Panama and Ecuador, and with Catholic Relief Services in Bolivia. He founded the local consultancy office for the Inter American Foundation in Ecuador where he worked until 1988, when he moved to Nicaragua. where he reunited with and eventually married his high-school sweetheart, Kathy McBride, Rivera worked for over two decades with potters from rural communities in Nicaragua, helping them to enhance their production methods, including the implementation of a more fuel-efficient kiln developed by Manny Hernandez, a professor at Northern Illinois University. He also worked with potters around the country to develop new designs and to connect to new markets.

The Family of the Americas Association, a Guatemalan organization, conducted a one-year follow-up study on the initial Mazariegos-developed filter project, concluding that this filter helped to reduce the incidence of diarrhea in participating households by as much as 50 percent. Laboratory testing and field studies have been performed on the filter by various institutions, including MIT, Tulane University, University of Colorado and University of North Carolina.

Beginning in 1998, Rivera traveled throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia to establish 30 filter microenterprises in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Nigeria, El Salvador, the Darfur region of Sudan, Myanmar and other countries. These factories have produced over 300,000 filters, and the filters are used by about 1.5 million people to date. An additional 13 filter workshops are scheduled to begin operating by the end of next year.

Legacy Rivera's filters were included in an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum called "Design for the Other 90 Percent."