Sunlight into drinking water — two Tongan islands just got water security

On Hunga and Matamaka in Tonga's Vava'u group, solar-powered desalination units now turn seawater into 8,600 litres of WHO-standard drinking water a day — no diesel, no bottled water shipped in by boat. Ten locals per island, at least half of them women, were trained to run the systems, built to serve for 15 years. For communities that lived on rainwater tanks, drought just lost its terror.