I met the managers of Kickstart technology at the recent TED Global conference in Arusha, Tanzania. Kickstart’s patented technology bridges the gap between expensive industrialize equipment used to pump, squeeze or pack and all it’s products are human powered. This is a very important feature in Africa for the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) market, because it solves the issue of energy and cost for equipment used in agriculture, and construction.
Kickstart’s most popular product is an irrigation pump that uses the stepping motion you see in a work-out gym to move water hundreds of feet to irrigate land. Kickstart also has been able to sell several thousands of these products all across Africa, and has been approach by the United Nations to sell globally.
Below is the irrigation pump
Kickstart pressing pump for building construction
Below you can see a picture of a person squeezing seeds to make oil
Here is a little more about Kickstart from the organization’s website.
About KickStart
KickStart’s mission is to help millions of people out of poverty. We promote sustainable economic growth and employment creation in Kenya and other countries by developing and promoting technologies that can be used by dynamic entrepreneurs to establish and run profitable small scale enterprises.
Phillip Isohe is a metal fabricator in the jua kali, non-traditional industrial sector, in Kenya. In his spare time he builds models of airplanes and buses. This seems to be an extension of what many of us did while growing up in Africa - building wire, or tin can, cars. What’s most interesting is the excruciating attention to detail that he puts into each one. In fact, they each have motors with working lights, steering, engine and interiors.
Phillip had just sold one of his buses, so the only other one I have a picture of is only half-built (picture). However, he did have a finished and working model airplane. It was amazing to see how each piece, engine included, was built from scratch. It’s not every day that you see this kind of detail work on hobbies, no matter where you are in the world.
The models take him 30 days to make and goes for about 25,000/= ($370). That’s likely just his “starting price” though, and they probably sell for a good deal less when he really wants to move it.
Inspiring, innovative and representative of what Africa’s future holds.
William Kamkwamba is a 19 year old Malawian who built his first windmill at 14. Here he is, pictured just this last week doing some work on his windmill near his home.
The propellers are made of plastic pipes supported by sticks to that they should not bend when the wind is strong and placed almost vertical to the direction the winds is coming.
Unlike in most windmills where the propellers directly turn the spindle connected to the turbines directly, William added pulleys to his machine to increase speed thereby generating more energy.
There are three pulleys and the last is connected to a bicycle wheel. When this wheel turns it turns a dynamo which in turn generates electricity.
Read his blog for inspiring stories about making things work in rural Africa!
Peter Kahugu of Banana Hill just outside Nairobi makes a living using his bicycle.
And no, he is not a professional cyclist.
AfriGadget reporter Afromusing and I had an opportunity to interview Peter who has modified his bicycle with a belt, a set of tensioning pulleys and a grinding stone to make it a knife-sharpening machine. By kicking the bike up onto its stand and engaging a gearing system, he is able to use “leg-horsepower” to drive a grinding wheel and sharpen knives while “on the move”.
Peter has been at this for 2 years now and he makes about Kshs 500 ( app. 10 US$) a day by riding his mobile workshop from client to client sharpening all their knives as he goes. The grinding stone he uses has lasted an astounding 2 years and he has had to replace his drive belt a couple of times but that is as simple as cutting up a long strip of rubber from an old car or bicycle tire inner tube.
Be sure to click though on the image for video on YouTube of the Peter and his bike in action.
Being on the ground in Nairobi makes it a little easier to find good AfriGadget stories. I took a walk down Ngong road, an area with a lot of shadetree mechanics, wood carvers and metal fabricators. The first place I stopped at had a home made welding machine.
Simon, the shop owner, showed me a couple of the machines and gave a video tour of how it works. He’s a prime example how an entrepreneur in Africa will figure out ingenious solutions to meet local market demands. The welders sell for around 14,000 Kenya Shillings (just over $200), but fabrication costs only a small fraction of that.
Below is the video and some pictures. (Another video will be uploaded later, connection speed issues preclude me uploading another one right now).
4 brothers in Western Kenya have begun solving water problems by creating waterpump windmills out of old bicycle parts and roofing materials. They have created 30 of them and are making good money doing it. This is another story of Africans solving their own problems using local materials:
The four Ututu brothers had inherited a large area of fertile farmland, which had been terraced by their father in the late 1950s. Despite this resource, they were experiencing problems because they lacked water both for drinking (meaning wasted time, fetching water from 15 km away in the dry season) and for irrigation (thus low yields from the meagre rainfall).
Most African children are forced to create their own toys from scratch. Below are some samplings of what they make with what’s available. Old tire inner-tubes, soda cans, mud, bailing wire and sticks are just a few of the materials used to create imaginative toys.
In just about every country in Africa you’ll find the boys making cars, motorcycles and airplanes out of tin cans and bailing wire:
In Southern Sudan children use mud to create animals to play with. Below is a picture of a Cape Buffalo:
The MultiMachine Group at Yahoo! Groups carries plans for “The Multi-Machine” which is
an accurate all-purpose machine tool that can be built by a semi-skilled mechanic with just common hand tools.
Multi-machines are 3 in 1 machines based on old car engine blocks (a 3-in-1 machine is usually a combination of a metal lathe, mill and drill press). The machines are designed such that they use the tolerances and engineering initially used to create the engine block that is re-purposed as the core of the tool to help guarantee that various components of the machine integrate with a high level of precision.
The machines have a design that not only allows them to be assembled using “elbow grease” but that also allow them to run on alternative power sources where mains electricity is not available. They are also easily adaptable to new purposes by adding on modules.
Marlies sends us a bunch of pictures and an interesting story on how bio gas toilets in Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya are being used:
Just the other day on a visit to Kibera Slum I came across this interesting bio gas latrine which is being set up for Kibera people as a response to lacking community toilets. The sanitation situation in Kibera is really really poor! There are a couple of community toilets which where set up after the shooting of the Constant Gardener but only a few years later these are in bad shape! Again, they cost 3/= per visit which is really above of what a typical Kibera inhabitant can afford. Just sum up what it will cost for 5 visits per day for a family of five! So the bio gas latrine is a really good option, since it will generate a little income to make the toilets free of charge.
[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 Marlies!]
New images! (July 17, 2007). Thanks to Christian Rieck and Marlies:
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.
The image is from Kevin Kelly’s site, it is of a wire toy made by a child in Uganda.
