AfriGadget

I didn’t believe it possible but I found this lady actually using a solar cooker in the Masai Mara!

Made only of cardboard and tin foil this cooker fold up into a neat little package. It apparently cooks potatoes and cabbage in just 1 hour!

She told me that she got it as part of a study - one solar cooker was given to every manyatta. She couldn’t rememer which organization was handing them out but she has adapted hers by putting her pot into a plastic bag which she says retains the heat better. She says she’ll continue using the solar cooker after the study and will even buy one  at Ksh 1,000.

She still has a 3 stone wood fire to cook meat.

I wonder what happens to this device when it rains…does the cardboard become a sodden mess?

The following story came in from Luca Varaschini (by way of David Sasaki) who was born and raised in Robertsport, Liberia where his father was a doctor. He now lives in Milan, Italy, but was in Robertsport a couple weeks ago for the first time since he left as a child.

During my first week back in Liberia I had been invited to Hawa’s birthday party, on Sembehun Beach, not far for Robertsport, so I passed some time with the ladies while they were preparing western-style food for everyone: rice, beef stake, pasta and potato salad. Then they started stirring what would have to be two cakes for the dessert, and I started wondering how they’d be able to bake them, since the only cooking apparels in the big warehouse were these coal pits on the ground.

They showed me the oven, a big metal cabinet against the far wall; looks like a refrigerator on legs, to allow a coal pit to fit under the bottom, but when I get near it, I see it’s a Blockbuster Quick Drop Booth! The front, where the slit had been closed, faces the wall and the back door is to access the oven; inside are several fridge trays, on which they lay the pans. The door is then locked with a simple bolt and sealed all around with wet cloths.

The cake was fabulous.

[Editor's note: I'm find myself incredibly curious trying to figure out where they found this... How did a Blockbuster drop box get to Liberia?]

Honey is one of the most valuable products of the drylands of Africa. It can be obtained by following a little bird called a honey guide to a bees nest in a tree, whereupon one raids the hive. Or bees can be farmed…in most places a bee keeper simply hollows out logs to make perfectly acceptable hives for local consumption. for commercial purposes however, Langstroth hives are universally thought to be superior to the traditional log hives found in Africa – the box shape make them easy to stack and move around,  and the movable frames guide bees to build combs in an organized manner making comb extraction easy. These hives also have a queen excluder, a mesh grid, usually made of wire or plastic, sized such that worker bees can pass through but the bigger queens cant. This keeps the queen from laying eggs in the honey combs called supers leading to cleaner honey. There are so many NGO’s, GOs and religious Orgs introducing these bright yellow langstroth hives across the Kenyan landscape.They don’t always catch on though - in rural areas people still prefer the logs…

Traditional log hives are hollowed out logs usually cut from specific tree species with the permission of the local chief. They are hung high in trees and the inside is rubbed with leaves of plants that attract bees – a practice that has been going on for eons. The bees enter the hives through a tiny hole and build their combs willy nilly throughout the space, it’s inefficient and the honey is of a lower quality as the larvae are all mixed up with the honey combs. Not very good for a business approach… or should I say Beesness?.

Logic would suggest that the Langstroth hives which produce cleaner honey and they save trees should be favoured right? Wrong! These modern hives are produced by experts in cities and cost a good $100 – far beyond the reach of anyone living in rural Kenya. It’s also rumoured that these hives are easily broken into by honey badgers, over heat in the dry climate of north Kenya driving bees away, and are expensive to maintain. On a personal note, I for one, find them extremely ugly too.

One bee keeping cooperative in Bogoria has figured out a cunning way of modifying traditional log hives to produce more honey. A bee excluder is made using coffee mesh.

Symon demonstrated how beeswax tracks are laid down to guide the bees where to build their combs in neat lines. Cost? One third of the Langstroth hive.

The honey is collected at night by naked men (yes totally naked …) they say that this prevents one from getting bees stuck in your clothing… I asked about the possibility of getting stung in sensitive places, they said the bees were far too civilized for that…but yes, people had fallen from the trees and been found comatose and butt naked at the tree base…

Raw honey with comb is sold to the local cooperative where wax is separated from honey. The machine is another jua kali item bought in a workshop in Nairobi.

Bees are smoked out of the hive using a home made smoker.

Production by 40 bee keepers was 8 tons last year, each Kg of raw honey was bought by the cooperative for Ksh 80 ($1), and sold on raw at Ksh 100, or processed and honey sold at Ksh 600 per kg ($8).

8 tons of raw honey were collected in 2008 – this is valued at Ksh640,000 for the 40 bee keepers in the business.

The wax is not wasted but converted into candles which sell for Ksh 10 each ($ 0.12).

Using a jua kali gadget for making candles, comprising a string, a piece of conduit pipe and two beer caps….ingenious!

Producing the sweetest smelling cheapest candles I’ve ever used. They claim they burn much longer than paraffin candles. Besides they smell delicious

Some sweet facts

· The dry lands of Kenya are the important honey producing districts in Kenya – the semi arid climate, diversity of flowering plants and easy access to fresh water makes it perfect for bees. Kenya is the fourth largest producer of honey in Africa 22,000 tons, China is the worlds largest producer at 299,000 tons (USA produces 70,000 tons) (figures for 2005).

· The group in Baringo produced 8 tons of honey last year.

· Kenya is a world center of bee diversity with over 3,000 species (about 10% of the worlds total number of species)

· Only 150 species or thereabouts produce honey in Kenya.

· Contrary to popular belief, most bee species are harmless… they have no stings

· The Kalenjin people immunize themselves to bees by purposely stinging babies with bees

· In many pats of Africa, honey is an important component of dowry or bride price – a kilogram being made as part payment for the bride – symbolic of the sweetness of sex - or so I’m told

· Bees pollinate most of the crops that we eat

· Bee keeping is most productive in natural habitats, and is a one of the few forms of resource extraction that does not destroy the environment.

The sour facts

· Bees in USA and Europe are disappearing fast – a condition described as colony collapse disorder (ie. Nobody knows why it’s happening). Africa is unaffected so far making honey production a very sweet deal.

Cows are playing an important role in land restoration in Baringo by eating up the invasive prickly pear cactus a nasty invasive plant that is destroying the drylands. It’s not obvious at all for cows to eat this thorny cactus, but Murry Roberts and his wife Elizabeth Meyerhoff told me about an amazing project that their organization, RAE (Rehabilitation of Arid Environments) has been working on. A few years ago they discovered that a local farmer had a bull that not only ate the nasty exotic thorny ugly, plant, but also taught other cows to go for it too.

This is very surprising because any self respecting cow, a sheep or a goat will not touch the nasty prickly pear. The farmer had aptly named his cow Mwalimu (Mwa-lee-moo  means Teacher in Kiswahili) because it taught other cows to eat the prickly pear .

Prickly pear (Opuntia ficus indica) is origninally from Mexico and is an economically important species of cactus – the red/purple fruit known as tuna’s are much sought after in many parts of the world. It has been cultivated in many parts of Africa as a hedge, but has become a serious pest because it spreads rapidly degrading ranch lands, and is very difficult to control. As a result, Opuntia eating cows are hugely important in the drylands of Kenya.

How did this farmer get his cow to eat Opuntia? During the drought of 1999 - 2000 grassy fields were reduced to bare earth and cows had nothing left to eat were dying of starvation leading to widespread famine. The story goes that one farmer persuaded his bull to eat the leaves after he had burned off the thorns. Opuntia are 80% water and if one can get past the thorns, the plant is quite nutritious . The other starving cows watched the bull and then followed suit thus saving the herd and the farmer who has never looked back. The thorns are burnt off using wood from another nasty invasive species, Prosopis juliflora - making this an eco-friendly project all round.

As part of RAE’s rehabilitation of Baringo’s drylands, and to make multiply the value of mwalimu bull to other farmers RAE bought the bull and during droughts, Mwalimu goes from one homestead to another teaching herds of cattle how to eat Opuntia, thereby saving hundreds of cattle and people from starvation. For Mwalimu it’s a job that saved his life - he is too valuable to be turned into beef burgers!

The cutting and use of Opuntia and Prosopis is also important in controlling these invasive species which have been planted as live fences, but which are fast becoming weeds in the degraded Baringo lowlands. Apart from prickly pear eating cows RAE also restore grasslands and eliminate soil erosion in an innovative project that has huge application across the drylands of Africa. We met women who were doubling their money by buying and fattening cows on restored grasslands in a 3 month period!

For more information, check it out here RAE Trust

You can also contribute to the good work of RAE by helping us spread the word and share this great innovation through your blog, facebook, twitter, digg, or stumble. Thanks!

Anyone who has been to Kitengela Glass near Nairobi will instantly recognize the works of art made from recycled glass, metal and other materials. Stunning works by local artists support a huge community of people and beautify gardens, offices, institutions and homes. I bet you aren’t expecting me to talk about crap right? Wrong!

Creating art from recycled glass takes a huge amount of energy. The glass recycling factory produces tiles, windows and other items, fueling it with used oil, butane gas and electricity. But now they are exploring the use of human gas, yes that’s right - it sounds disgusting, smells disgusting, but what a wonderful source of energy!

Apart from the excrement from pigs, chickens, horses, donkeys, ostriches, ducks, and geese

human wastes are collected … in these loos designed to keep you intrigued…

and seated for long enough to be ‘productive’.

The wastes (no, not the human ones) are transported to the biogas production site in a specially designedloooong-armed wheelbarrow

where it is poured into this big pot, where it is stirred (not shaken) by a professional shit stirrer.

Then it flows to the fermentation pit to digest….

Notice how the toilets are being constructed at the top end of the system. This allows the poo to flow directly into the first tank .. it flows by gravity to the fermentation tank and then a settling tank before the sludge flows out and down a drain into another holding tank out of the picture.

The gas is piped to the household kitchen and the glass art workshops,

while the waste sludge is extracted and used on the gardens, i.e. total recycling!

In addition the Kitengela Glass factory creates an odd assortment of jobs from artists to poop stirrers, farmers and  biogas producers… for more information read about Kitengela here.

Amazing isn’t it - The first example of Art from Fart

There are few things that make me madder than seeing lorry loads of charcoal going into schools, hospital and other institutions in Kenya. These places are wrecking havok on our natural environment because they need energy for cooking  - but wont use clean (but more expensive) options like butane gas. Another thing that really irks me is the plastic waste that is taking over our country, it is disgusting, unhygenic and am environmental disaster that we not only drive by, or walk past every single day - we contribute to it through our negligent shopping habits (how many times does a lump of butter have to be bagged in Nakumatt?).

So when one of Kenya’s youngest architects, Mumu Musuvo and his boss Jim Archer told me about the Kibera community cooker two years ago I was very interested. They were looking for funding from the company I ran. I studied the design and took in the environmental implications, saw the potential but my company was not biting. We turned his company, Planning Systems down but I’ve been secretly monitoring the project which was adopted by UNEP and launched earlier this year.

This post is a massive send out to Planning Systems to congratulate them for being highly commended by judges in the Energy, Waste and Recycling category at the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Spain - it’s reported here on CNN. The communal cooker is turning rubbish into fuel to feed residents of one of Africa’s biggest slums, Kibera, 

 

Garbage is brought to the community cooker by volunteers shovel itinto one end of a giant concrete oven. At the other end are the hotplates where the community cook and boil water. 

“It might smell a bit but it doesn’t make  our food taste any different,” says Virginia Wamaitha, as she pours sugar into her steaming pan of chai – the gently spiced tea loved by Kenyans. “It will taste just like chai should.”

 

The garbage to fuel oven is sponsored by UNEP as one way to clean up Kenya’s slums while reducing dependency on wood and charcoal to protect forests. The community cooker burns garbage and generates heat for sterilizing water, for ovens used by community groups, as well as individuals. The original concept was that a kikapu (basket) of garbage would equate to an hour of cooking time on the stove. 

What kind of garbage? Any, plastics, food wastes even clothes - anything that will burn really! But doesn’t that produce toxic fumes you ask?? This is what’s so clever about the project. Using technology that I don’t understand the oven burns at temperatures of up to 930 degrees F. which basically detoxifies many hazardous pollutants.

“It uses a superheated steel plate inside the incinerator box to vaporize drops of water. The oxygen released then helps burn discarded “sump” oil from vehicles – itself a pollutant in the slums – driving temperatures higher”.

The process is simple enough to be controlled by locally trained volunteers.

According to UNEP this is the first of its kind, and it cost $10,000. 

Personally I think it’s a brilliant  idea, a great solution to slum garbage disposal, water treatment and hygiene (hot water an be used for community showers, to clean toilets, and to cook meals - therefore is safer (no more unstable jiko’s with pots of boiling water that kids tumble into on the floor). Plus the cooker can be used for commercial purposes - womens groups are using the cooker to produce baked products like queen cakes (you know the ones - “coke and keki”

Imagine if this could be replicated in slums around the world, in IDP camps like Kakuma, Dadaab, and in hospitals, prisons, and schools. 

Don’t let me blow their trumpet - help share this important story. You can read more praise for this project here  and Rob Crilly on CS monitor has a detailed article here and its also here on Sustainable Development International website here and on Sustainable Footprint here

Google Earth is one way to appreciate the crush in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum. Not surprisingly popular images of people living in desperate conditions aren’t far from the truth when it comes to this corner of Nairobi - but out of the madness comes a little hope.

I witnessed some amazing innovations in Kibera and conclude that people have adjusted to their situation and are making the most of it.  Because of the stress associated with limitations on land, energy, water, and food the people have found innovative ways of surviving. This post is mainly about farming.

Vertical farming

like this guy and his vertical garden which feeds his family and he even sells some produce. It’s a variation on what JKE wrote about in the post on Keyhole gardens in Botswana.

Finding land in rubbish

Now a local organic farming company Green Dreams has been documenting the progress of transforming a garbage dump to an organic farm on the Green Dreams blog. They are working with a local youth group comprising reformed criminals in converting garbage into organic manure, and garbage dumps into organic farms.

Irrigation taps the mains water and supplies nutrient rich feeds from organic fertilizer produced on the site from crops and worms, yes they harvested local earthworms to start vermiculture.

Check out the planting implements, a PVC Pipe adapted to deliver seeds into a perfectly dug hole!  This was invented to help with the back breaking work of planting.

After 3 months the community of 30 families were harvesting, eating and selling organic produce. Yum! Impossible to ignore how a dirty dump turned green, everyone wants a farm in Kibera now. This group is now selling their expertise to raise funds and help others.

Natural Bean Tenderizer

There was a smouldering fire where banana leaves were being reduced to ash, then the ash dissolved in water and the brown murky astringent solution sold for Ksh 50 ($.80) per 250 ml in vodka bottles! This is a bean tenderizer reducing the time to boil red kidney beans by 50%! Imagine the savings on charcoal/fuel.

Safe Dispensing of Fuel

Notice that there was no protection around the farm or it’s equipment. Apparently the reputation of these ‘reformed criminals’ is enough of a deterrent.

Life might be hard in Kibera but yet when you visit you can’t ignore the vibrancy, colorfulness, camaraderie amongst the inhabitants it was one time that I got the feeling that people here love life

Bush camping is one of the greatest pleasures of living in Kenya – only if you have the right equipment. On a recent hastily planned trip to Lake Magadi hot springs we discovered too late that we’d forgotten the jiko (charcoal cooking stove). Stopping in Magadi town which serves only one industry, the Magadi Soda Company, we had one made for us right there and then in a very active jua kali workshop.

I always wondered where the metal for jiko’s came from - In this the many discarded gas cylinders are chopped into segments to make up the body of the jiko.

There seems to be no power shortage here, a mess of electric cables and metal and wooden waste remnants from the soda company is an active business for about 20 artisans making furniture, gates, and jikos for the staff of the soda company.

A ten minute job turned out into a one hour event and a thousand shillings later ($20) we take off proudly with our extremely heavy stove. That’s when we discover that there is no charcoal to be had in this part of the world anyway. We ended up with a 3 stone fire.

At dinner time we realized that we’d forgotten most of the food anyway (camping note to Paula: don’t believe him when he says “I already put it in the car” ).

Nevertheless, the hot springs were fabulous.

The Jiko came home and has not yet been used - and thinking about it now … should I be worrying about cooking on something made from gas cylinders? Is it just iron or could there be lead in this?

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?

• the surrounding stones retain the rich soils and keep it safe from erosion
• the round shape retains moisture
• compact size, even small plots can be used for gardening
• raised beds enable the sick and elderly to help with the gardening work
• center in the middle is used for composting and reuse of greywater (= reuse of nutrients)

“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.

Makeni is a small town in Sierra Leone. Like the rest of the country, it is trying to recover from years of internal strife. Unlike the rest of the country, they have the Binkolo Growth Centre, a small industrial project near Makeni where the manufacture of small farm implements, tailoring, carpentry and blacksmithing takes place, and includes the use of disabled people. Two VSO volunteers, one from Kenya one from Canada, work to train and bring new ideas to the centre.

One such idea was to create a fuel replacement for their pickup by using local palm nuts, a by-product of the palm kernels, which are generally fed to pigs or used for fertilizer. Since diesel fuel for their truck runs approximately $5/gallon, it wouldn’t hurt to try.

It became clear that in our poor country the chief hurdles were getting the chemicals and the right equipment. The search was on for the chemicals and after quite a treasure hunt and more than a few bribes we managed to find 4 litres of Methanol and 5 kilos of Potassium Hydroxide (enough to make a good bomb I think)…

…Actually the whole scene was quite amusing. Here we were hoping to compete with the big oil producers in the back yard of a small village and using an untried collection of old car parts, old pipes and taps attached to a used chemical container, all put together in an image downloaded from the internet. Nonetheless we were fuelled by much excitement, with much of the local community looking on, wondering what on earth we were up to.

Read the rest of this great story, and see a lot more images, on Paul in Sierra Leone’s Blog!

(hat tip Emeka)