Our good friend Forsty sent in the following picture of a “climatised” bus he took in Mopti, Mali the other day:
While it may not be the perfect example of an AfriGadget, it still helps to illustrate how people make do with what is available.
For some folks this may just be an unroadworthy vehicle, for others it’s a comfortable bus that will take you from A to B. Hey, and did we mention it’s air-conditioned? 
Solar water disinfection (SODIS) has been around for quite some time now and with approx. over 340.000 users in Africa alone, this low budget water disinfection “technology” is a smart approach that deserves to be mentioned on AfriGadget.
In areas where piped drinking water just isn’t available or of questionable quality, solar water disinfection is a cheap and effective method for decentralized water treatment as it can be applied at household level. It is a simple method that’s easy to teach and is designed for small scale production.
(source )
SODIS uses solar radiation to destroy pathogenic microorganisms which cause water borne diseases:
Sunlight is treating the contaminated water through two synergetic mechanisms: Radiation in the spectrum of UV-A (wavelength 320-400nm) and increased water temperature. If the water temperature raises above 50°C, the disinfection process is three times faster. (source)
The World Health Organization (WHO) even recommends SODIS as a viable method for household water treatment and safe storage.
All you will need are clean & transparent PET bottles, fill them up with water and expose them to direct sunlight for at least 6 hours . Many people also put them on a corrugated roof (to increase temperature) and saturate the oxygen content inside the bottles prior to the sun treatment by filling them up three quarters, shaking them for 20 seconds with a closed cap on and then fill them up completely.
(source)
SODIS may also replace the boiling of water which often requires vast amounts of firewood or other natural resources, so it not only helps people obtain safer drinking water (conventional filter candles are expensive and not always available) but also helps to preserve the local environment.
SODIS obviously can’t substitute really clean drinking water, and it often also requires pre-treatment in case the water turbidity is too high . Users can easily reduce the turbidity though by letting the bottles stand for a while until the particles settle to the ground and then also filter it through a folded cloth.
The best aspect about SODIS though - despite of it’s low budget approach - is that consumers are directly in charge of their drinking water and have a working method that enables them to treat their own drinking water.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) also published a very informative website on SODIS and provides more details about the technology as well as case studies from around the world.
Here’s an interesting simple, low-maintenance technology:
“Elephant Pumps” that were introduced to rural areas in Zimbabwe and Malawi during the last few years. These rather simple, enhanced rope pumps (based on an ancient Chinese technology) where designed for use in rural areas, where the supply of readymade spare parts isn’t that easy.
Cycle option on an Elephant Pump
Now, what makes the Elephant Pump so different from the other popular low-maintenance pump “Afripump” is that it’s locally assembled and maintainable by the local community. Both systems - Afripump and Elephant Pump - may have their pro & cons (80-100m depth, high durability, low-maintenance vs. <40m depth, simple design, cheaper), but I especially like the “bicycle option” added to pumps which were built for schools:
On school pumps Pump Aid often incorporates a “bicycle” system onto the Elephant Pump since this has proved enormously popular with children. Most children in Zimbabwe have never had the chance to ride a bicycle so can even come to school early to “play” on the pump thereby helping to fill the school water tanks. The job of collecting water, once a tiresome chore, becomes fun and children no longer have to leave their classrooms to walk miles carrying buckets of water on their heads from a distant muddy pool.
The British Charity Org “Pump Aid“, which has in the past introduced and promoted these systems in Zimbabwe and Malawi for the costs of GBP 250 (~ USD 460, EUR 310) each, also created a very informative video on how the technology actually works:
“The Elephant Pump yields about one litre of clean water every second for an average well depth of 20 metres.”
It’s simple, it works, it wins!
[h/t NextBillion.net]
Following a story on BBC News that fellow blogger Sokari of BlackLooks had already picked up earlier in June (as well as Alison), our reader Zeno dropped in an e-mail, asking if we knew more about keyhole gardens.
Keyhole gardens?
Actually, I had heard about those Folkewall installations in Gabarone, Botswana the other day that are used for greywater recycling, but keyhole gardens were indeed quite new to me. Guess this also shows how many smart solutions still exist out there that will need to be rediscovered and put in use.
source: African Gardens
Keyhole gardens are a technique used to grow vegetables in a dry climate. They are actually a special form of raised bed gardens: circular waist high raised beds with a path to the center. Walled in by stones, there’s a basket made from sticks and straw in the center that holds manure and other organic kitchen waste for compost.
Since they look like a keyhole from above, they are often called keyhole gardens and also promoted under this name in Lesotho, where the charity organisation “Send a Cow” has been promoting the creation of these special gardens for some time now.
So what makes these gardens so special?
“Send a Cow” also created a very informative website on their activies and published some valuable How-to-manuals for us to adopt this smart approach. Please also check out this funny animation on YouTube which puts it in plain enligsh comic style
Now I am only curious to know if we could also mix the greywater with some collected urine and use that as additional fertilizer. In any case, keyhole gardens are a very appropriate “technology” which certainly isn’t limited to countries with a dry climate.
Ingenuity, obviously, isn’t only limited to the African continent, as it is especially found in societies where access to resources is limited. While we’ve been able to witness lots of interesting innovations from other regions of the world that were born out of a lack of readily available solutions, we must also not forget that a few smart ideas were actually developed in Africa and have since then conquered the world.
One of such smart ideas is the Ventilated (Improved) Pit Latrine, in short: the VIP – which was developed as the “Blair Latrine” by Peter Morgan, who has been living and working in Zimbabwe for over 35 years, researching and developing water and sanitation technologies.
Diagram showing effect of vent pipe on functions of pit latrine (source)
The major advantage of the VIP over a normal pit latrine is that it comes with a ventilation pipe (covered with a durable fly screen on top) which reduces flies and odour. In the absence of other alternatives, the Ventilated Pit Latrine is considered reliable, which explains the success of this technology: over 500.000+ units of this type have been built in Zimbabwe alone and it has proven to work elsewhere around the world.
The VIP clearly isn’t the solution to sustainable sanitation as it comes with a few limitations, but it does function without water and has very low investment, operation and maintenance costs.
Next to some interesting experiments with different water pump systems such as the Blair hand pump (also known as the Zimbabwe Bush Pump) or the spiral water wheel pump, Peter is also active in the field of ecological sanitation and recently published a very interesting booklet titled “Toilets That Make Compost” where he writes about his experiences with compost toilets such as the Arborloo and the Fossa Alterna.
screenshot from Peter Morgan’s manual on how to build an Arborloo (PDF,~ 3,1MB)
While there’s no single sanitation concept that will work in all places around the world, the VIP for one is a proven technology which has been accepted by its users since 30 years.
Cross posted on Kikuyumoja’s Realm.
I was travelling in an upcountry minibus today when the guy seated just next to me pulled out his new mobile phone he recently purchased in Embu, Kenya.
Safaricom, the biggest mobile phone network provider in Kenya with about 5 million customers, introduced some handsets in the past, which enable resellers to deliver phone services to the public. Such handsets, which look like phones for fixed-lines, often come with an external display that shows the units consumed by customers.
The two (gsm) mobile phone networks in Kenya have become very succesful, as the state owned telecommunications company only provided the country with about 300.000 fixed-lines of which many are out of order or have been subject to vandalism.
Next to providing the public with mobile phone booths, these public phones also offer a great small-scale business opportunity for the owners of such handsets. And for those who obtain their pre-paid scratchcards at a wholesale price, there’s a 5% revenue coming along. These public phone booths are just a perfect way of helping people start their own business where the initial starting costs are quite low.
(please excuse the poor picture quality)
So, instead of buying a rather expensive Safaricom handset which is specially designed for use with these roadside telephone booths, this guy next to me bought the Afrigadget-solution: This gadget actually is a very cheap MadeInChina fixed-line phone which has been ripped of it’s inwards. The person who modified it ripped an old Siemens C25 phone apart and installed its display instead of the one that came along with this phone. The keypad is soldered to the phone and a rechargeable battery is inside the box with an external power supply.
The SIM card holder at the back of the phone comes with a dual-SIM-card adapter so that the operator may add another network and switch between both networks by simply switching it on and off.
These DIY-handsets for public phone booths come at a price range of about Ksh. 2.000 - 5.000 /= (~ US-$ 28 - 70) and are about half of the price the “official” handsets are selling for.
