Aissa Derhem first heard about fog collection when he was studying for his Ph.D. in Canada in the 1980s. He read a story in 1989 about one of the world’s first projects to collect water from the air, which had just been started in Chile’s Atacama Desert by FogQuest.

(FogQuest is a non-profit Canadian charity, founded in 2000, which has been planning and implementing water projects for rural communities in developing countries since 1987, using fog collectors and effective rainfall collectors to collect natural atmospheric sources of water. Currently, it is working in eight countries.)