Fluence Corporation was awarded a €1.5M contract by Vinci Construction Grands Projets (France) to supply three NIROBOX reverse-osmosis seawater desalination units for the French island of Mayotte between Madagascar and the coast of Mozambique, in the Indian Ocean.

This follows the company’s recent award of a NIROBOX desalination plant in South Africa.

“The global decentralized water purification market value will increase from US $2.7 billion in 2016 to US $4.4 billion in 2021. We have designed our NIROBOX smart packaged solution to capture a large part of this market,” said Henry Charrabé, Fluence managing director and CEO.

Treated water from the NIROBOX also will serve residents of Petite-Terre, a smaller island that’s part of Mayotte.

Mayotte was forced to impose water restrictions due to the late arrival of seasonal rains. The island’s resources were already under pressure from a rising local population, which saw water consumption jump by 9.7 percent in 2016. The drought has exacerbated Mayotte’s water scarcity and an immediate solution for high-quality potable water was needed.

Fluence was established last May through the merger of Emefcy, which devised a breakthrough wastewater treatment system, with RWL Water. The company headquarters is in New York while the Israel business of each company was merged into Emefcy’s main research-and-production center in Caesarea, Israel. Fluence operates in more than 70 countries.

In related news, Fluence signed an agreement this week with Stanford University in California to deploy, test and evaluate Fluence MABR (membrane aerated biofilm reactor) wastewater treatment technology at Stanford’s Codiga Resource Recovery Center. The first Fluence MABR plant in the US, the Bordeaux plant in US Virgin Islands, has been in operation for almost a year.