Ron Rivera (public health)

Rivera died in Managua, Nicaragua on September 3, 2008, after contracting falciparum malaria while working in Nigeria. A memorial service held in Managua on September 6 at the Universidad Centroamericana was attended by hundreds, including scores of local potters. During his stay in Nigeria he worked endlessly to put together a ceramic water filter factory.

Ron Rivera, Lynette Yetter, Jeff Rogers and Reid Harvey co-authored the paper, "A Sustainable Ceramic Water Filter for Household Purification," which Lynette Yetter presented at a NSF Conference in 2000.

Beginning in 1998, Rivera traveled throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia to establish 30 filter microenterprises in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Nigeria, El Salvador, the Darfur region of Sudan, Myanmar and other countries. These factories have produced over 300,000 filters, and the filters are used by about 1.5 million people to date. An additional 13 filter workshops are scheduled to begin operating by the end of next year.

Rivera worked with the Peace Corps in Panama and Ecuador, and with Catholic Relief Services in Bolivia. He founded the local consultancy office for the Inter American Foundation in Ecuador where he worked until 1988, when he moved to Nicaragua.

After moving to Nicaragua in the late 1980s, where he reunited with and eventually married his high-school sweetheart, Kathy McBride, Rivera worked for over two decades with potters from rural communities in Nicaragua, helping them to enhance their production methods, including the implementation of a more fuel-efficient kiln developed by Manny Hernandez, a professor at Northern Illinois University. He also worked with potters around the country to develop new designs and to connect to new markets.

Rivera first became passionate about ceramics in the early 1970s when he studied in Cuernavaca, Mexico with Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, who taught that human beings had lost their connection with the earth. Rivera then went to live with an experienced potter and learned the art of ceramics.

Ronald Rivera (August 22, 1948 – September 3, 2008) was an American activist of Puerto Rican descent who is best known for promoting an inexpensive ceramic water filter developed in Guatemala by the chemist Fernando Mazariegos and used to treat gray water in impoverished communities and for establishing community-based factories to produce the filters around the world.