Many have accused her of claiming credit for something which already was in existence and attaching her name to it. What they do not know, is that the inventor of the Veronica Buckets; Mrs. Veronica Bekoe, birthed the idea as far back as the 90’s.
Essentially, the idea of creating portable buckets with the tap attached have been in existence for over 30 years.
She explained, during an interview with Ghanaweb’s People and Places, that she noticed a problem at the Public Health and Reference Laboratory of the Ghana Health Service during her stay there in the '70s. Handwashing! At the time, it was just a number of bowls with water stationed in the labs and lots of people had to use the same water for handwashing and rinsing, till it was changed.
For her, it was doing more harm than good to people like her and the rest of her colleagues. So she thought of a better way to get running water for the laboratory scientists, proposed it to her American supervisor who bought into it.
A first prototype was developed from aluminium sheets and a spigot and the invention was finally birthed in the ’90s.
Her response to the question of whether or not there was anything like these buckets at the time she had the idea was;
“Not to my knowledge, if they were, then they were not in smaller units like I proposed so that they could be used at various places, movable and handy; you can take it wherever.
But if there were containers with taps, maybe they were big containers to hold water for households or institutions but not the small units that I proposed. I’m not sure whether even those big drums were in existence before I introduced the Veronica Buckets.”
On when it was finally introduced, Mrs. Bekoe said,
“As early as 1992 or 93, in the laboratories initially because we introduced them for the laboratories. When the, for example, clinics and heads of the hospitals realised this is what had been introduced for the laboratories and they found it useful, they introduced it to other parts of the facility where they did not have running water and the rest is history.”
Today, she is glad her little solution to a problem is going beyond the laboratory and helping save lives, especially with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It has gone beyond way behind the health sector and it's being used everywhere, even beyond Ghana.”
Watch the full video as inventor of the Veronica Buckets tells her story:
Report by Wonder Ami Hagan
