Even in the driest of deserts, there’s a hidden water source: the air.

That's the insight of this year's Dyson Award winner. The annual prizes call on “design and engineering students from 18 countries to create innovative, practical, elegant solutions to some of humanity's greatest challenges,” according to The Huffington Post. This year the award went to Edward Linacre for his groundbreaking solution to agricultural catastrophes caused by drought. He won £10,000 for his invention—the Airdrop—and so did his school, Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology. The Airdrop pulls air into a network of tubes underground, where it is cooled to extract moisture and then funneled down to plants’ roots. See his “elevator pitch” for the project below:

Harvesting water from the air isn’t a new idea; National Geographic reported on the ancient technique of fog harvesting back in 2009. Linacre told the Daily Mail that his design is a unique solution for agricultural issues because “other systems of harvesting water from the atmosphere usually require massive amounts of energy, as they run refrigeration units. Airdrop simply uses the temperature difference between the air and the cool earth beneath the surface.” The Airdrop, he says, is a good solution for rural farmers because it’s low-tech: they can install and maintain it themselves.

Whether or not this design can practically translate to the developing world is still up in the air and probably depends largely upon its cost. Still, the simple idea of tapping into the water that’s present in the air in even the driest of environments could be very promising for increasingly parched areas of the globe.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act has generated many jobs in the clothing manufacturing sector, especially for women. Photo: Jenny Bussey Vaughan/Mercy Corps

Most Americans may have never heard of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, but their closets probably contain at least one article of clothing imported as part of it.

The act — AGOA, by its acronym — was passed by Congress in 2000. It’s a free-trade deal between the U.S. and a number of Sub-Saharan African nations that eliminates quotas and duties for certain goods. It allows African products to compete with those from other regions on a more level playing field on the U.S. market. 87 percent of these imports consist of petroleum and minerals, according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations. That’s not all, though, as Florizelle Lizer, the assistant U.S. trade representative for Africa explained to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs:

The main focus of our efforts and our capacity-building assistance related to AGOA has always been to promote new nontraditional and value-added exports from Africa like apparel, footwear, processed agricultural products and manufactured goods.

This is where you’ll find AGOA’s selling point for the average Joe or Joanna in one of its member states. It’s created tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and many of these new employees are women. Some of the largest gains are in clothing manufacturing. For a poor, landlocked country like Lesotho, clothing exports tripled and 50,000 new jobs appeared following its entrance into AGOA, according to a report by Lawrence Edwards and Robert Lawrence. It’s also helping to empower women by providing them access to a regular income, comments Zambia News Features.

There’s a catch, though: AGOA says the materials used to make products exported to the U.S. must be manufactured in the exporting country or, at the very least, in another AGOA state. But being able to manufacture fabrics on an industrial scale is a tall order for developing nations that don’t already have that kind of infrastructure. Luckily for them, another piece was added to AGOA a few years after it debuted. It’s called the Third Country Fabric Rule, and it allows African countries to import their fabric from other parts of the world, manufacture the finished product at home, and then export it to the U.S. under AGOA.

The Third Country Rule doesn’t quite sync up with AGOA, and must be renewed more frequently. AGOA itself isn’t up for revision until 2015, while the Third Country Rule is set to expire in 2012. In May, AllAfrica reported that the U.S. had said that "its market would no longer be accepting garments whose raw materials could have been sourced from outside the exporting country." Since then, a U.S. congressman submitted a bill to extend the Rule until 2015, though an article from Forbes argues that recent U.S. actions concerning AGOA constitute a kind of "benign neglect."

Not everyone is in favor of AGOA in its current state, though. Some call it a fig leaf for the oil industry or a cap on the growth of African manufacturing. U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is a supporter, but in a recent speech at the AGOA forum in Zambia she pointed out some of its shortcomings, according to Procurement News. She said African governments need to work on providing greater support to manufacturers — citing the example of an American business that chose to import from Vietnam instead of an AGOA because Vietnamese government subsidies meant that the factory there could churn out products more quickly. Clinton also criticized the fact that countries "export only a handful of the 6,500 products," eligible under AGOA, while "the most common export is still a barrel of oil." Others see the Third Country Rule as actually stunting the growth of local textile industries. It might be cheaper to import from Asia in the short run, but local businesses could suffer the long-term.

But in the minds of many, allowing the rule to lapse — or even threatening to let it do so — makes investors nervous and hurts countries’ long-term prospects. Here’s hoping congressional inaction concerning your clothing’s origin won’t cost an African woman the shirt off her back.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.