AfriGadget

Mark Steudal, a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, sends us this:

This is a picture of a Bio Gas generator. It is basically a 9 foot deep well that is filled with manure and water from the nearby cows. A huge drum is then placed into the well. The drum catches the methane gases that are generated from the manure decomposing, which due to the pressure of the large drum are pumped into the house by a underground hose. This family did most of their cooking on the gas, didn’t need to use firewood or buy charcoal (except when making chapatis of course).

[NOTE: If you have any images, stories or reports you'd like others to know about, you can contact us through the AfriGadget contact form. - Thanks Mark!]

Kevin Kelly (Co-founder of Wired, author and technologist extraordinaire) blogged about african truck toys, which show the ingenuity of using local materials to make something useful, fun and yes…very cool.

The image is from Kevin Kelly’s site, it is of a wire toy made by a child in Uganda.
These are the types of toys the Afrigadget authors and african blogosphere members played with when they were children. I would like to request that if you have pictures showing toys such as these, if you would kindly comment or use our contact page to send us images,so we can showcase more of African ingenuity. You can also tag your images in flickr with afrigadget and we’ll be sure to see them.