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.

Santosh Ostwal saw a problem and spent half a lifetime trying to fix it until he finally found the solution in an unlikely place — his cell phone. According to an article in The Economist , as a boy, Ostwal would watch his grandfather walk miles a day, back and forth, to turn on and off the irrigation systems for his crops. The walks were dangerous. Alone at night, farmers faced muggings, wild animals and snakes in what Ostwal saw as an unnecessary journey.

Ostwal knew that life could be easier for Indian farmers and began devising a way to set the water pumps on a timer. In an interview with The Economist , he explains the need that he saw.

There are 3.1 million official connections of water pump sets in Maharashtra alone. The all-India figure is more than 1 billion. While farmers didn’t mind too much with the drill of walking up to the farm to switch on their motor pump sets and then head back home, I found that there was a strong resistance to walk back all the way to the farm to switch off their pump sets. A lot of water and electricity would be wasted.

The road to success was long and difficult. It began with a cheap alarm clock to trigger the system, which, according to The Economist, provided half an answer. It was possible to use the alarm clock to start the water pumps, but it couldn’t then be used to turn them off. While it certainly decreased the amount of walking, it did nothing to improve the water waste or soil erosion damaging crop outputs.

His next solution was to tap into existing radio frequencies using a remote control. This proved to be immensely expensive and difficult to get clearances to work on. Finally, after investing so much money that Ostwal, his wife, and two children were forced out of their apartment, he realized that he could instead tap into the wireless phone network. Within 15 minutes, Ostwal got the result for which he had been searching for nearly two decades.

The cell phone solution, which he has dubbed Nano Ganesh, provides the perfect answer. It uses already existing, cheap technology to start and stop the water flow from anywhere, sparing the farmers their long, dangerous walks. It also prevents soil erosion from excessive watering, which increases crop output for the more than 10,000 farmers across India. In fact, the technology has proven so useful that it is now being used in Egypt and Australia. And it's such a simple fix that it could continue to spread and ease the lives of farmers around the world.

For a full podcast interview with Santosh Ostwal, click here.