One of the cheapest form of transport in Kenya is the “Boda Boda” literally meaning “Border-to-border”, a bicycle ride from one countries boarder immigration offices through no-mans land to the immigration offices of the bordering country customs office.

This mode of transport is non discriminatory and is used by people of all walks of life. from school children, market goers, workers, business persons, etc. The popularity is partially due to the speed and convenience as one does not get stuck in traffic. In the Lake basin town of Kisumu there are estimated to be over 500,000 BodaBoda’s. In the whole county, in excess of 1,500,000

The BodaBoda rider normally works from as early as 4.30a.m. to as late as 10.00p.m. depending on security in the area. He relies greatly on his mobile phone for clients to call for his services. His peak cycling times are early morning, lunch hour and dusk as persons head home from school and work. Translates to 4 – 5 hours in total daily riding time.

Due to the lack of know how and the complexity of electronics, the lack of power storage (i.e. a battery, and the cost) the Cycle dynamo is only effective for charging items and lighting while he is riding. Also, due to space or lack of, cost, insecurity and theft, attaching “Hard” Solar panels to the bikes has never been a viable sustainable option.

However, with the introduction of the Flexible Panels I believe wearing the panels on his back eliminates all these constraints. It also means he is generating power from sun-up to sun-down, an average of 12 hours a day.

Attaching the flexible panels on his back ensures:

1. His phone is always charged guaranteeing customer accessibility
2. He has light at home from the LED’s so saves on heavy power bills
3. He always has an emergency light with his – LED
4. The panels will not get stolen
5. One can also offer charging facilities to client being carried

Other users
The BodaBoda is not the only potential user of the Flexible Panel by wearing it. Anyone spending long hour’s outdoors is a candidate. The farmer, fisherman, hawker’s and peddlers, city council outdoor workers, tourists, campers and hikers – just to mention a few.

Attaching the Panel
It can be attached in a variety of ways. Velcro, Pop Buttons or simply attach Rucksack like straps so it can be worn with any garment. In the latter case the small pouch containing the controller and battery is attached to the back of the panels with Velcro.

If you would like to get in touch with Dominic, you can reach him at dwanjihia@yahoo.com or by phone at +254722700530

Hayford Bempong and David Celestin are electricians at Accra Polytechnic, who I wrote about last as they had fabricated an FM radio station from scratch and used it at Maker Faire Africa. Hayford and David seemed like just the type to take a look at the bag and really determine its use. Being college-level students, they have a different type of lifestyle than many, and that might mean more ideas and thoughts about what the FLAP bag could be used for.

Electrical Students in Ghana take on the FLAP bag from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

True to form, they were not nearly as excited about the quality of the stitching, or the textiles used, but very interested in the internal electrical components. They were excited about the idea of a bag with an in-built solar panel, and were curious as to wattage and the ability use step-ups and inverters to make it even more useful.

One suggestion that they made was around durability of the electrical components, specifically they suggested that a metal box should be built around it. Life in Africa can be quite rough on gear, and the chance that someone will sit on, drop, or crush this part is quite high.

I’m a sucker for radios and antennas, and was just so excited to see the guys from Accra Polytechnic at Maker Faire Africa. Hayford Bempong, David Celestin and Michael Amankwanor are three members of the National Society of Black Engineers who have created a full radio with their own funds and brains.

They showed up at the event and setup the local Maker Faire Africa radio station, running at 101.7 FM. In conjunction with the speakers that they setup for the close proximity announcements, the radio was used to transmit up to a couple thousand meters away and spread the word about upcoming activities.

Basic electronics

David Celestin has been building power inverters and other electronic devices from scratch since he was a teenager. Below is one of his first power inverters, that still works, and which runs out of a little box. You can tell it is all fabricated from scraps and locally available materials.

Here is their home-brew VHF SWR meter:

Antennas

The team also creates their own antennas from scratch, including the “slim jim” below, “ground plane and a circular antenna.

This is a corn planter. It costs approximately $10 (15 Cedis) to make, and it significantly decreases the time that it would normally take to plant corn. This invention came about by taking a look a medical pill dispensing devices and transferring that knowledge to his communities needs.

Shamsudeen (“Sham”) Napara lives in the norther part of Ghana, which is a lot more rural and isolated than the southern part of the country where you find Accra, or the central part, where you find Kumasi. He has a metal fabrication shop where he builds tools, mostly for agricultural needs of those in the surrounding areas.

He was at Maker Faire Africa this weekend and I was completely amazed at both the ingenuity and the quality of his work.

Shea Nut Roaster

That’s not all that Sham has been up to though, in fact, he’s been busy with a couple other projects. Specifically, he’s been working with Amy Herman from the Univesity of Indiana to figure out how to enhance traditional processes familiar to those in Norther Ghana. This means he does a lot with Shea nuts and the processing of them. It is one of the few fields dominated by the women in the community, and a lucrative business, since the processing from raw to refined can net a good margin of profit.

Below is a shea nut roaster – a small version, since the large ones are the size of a table. It costs around $40 (60 Cedi), and it decreases the time and energy normally expended in the work of getting the nuts ready for processing.

Soap Cutter

Though he has many more inventions in his workshop in Northern Ghana, the last of the three items that he brought to Accra was a soap cutter. It’s a device that has a hinge on one end that opens and closes with piano wires and guitar screws to hold wire tight across the device. As it is closed, it slices the soap cleanly.

Cleaning massive amounts of water with chlorine from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

Suprio Das is part of the water-cleansing team with Killian Deku, Laura Stupin and Bernard Kiwia. Besides the ball-valve doser, they’ve also created a siphon mechanism chlorine filter. It, like all of the IDDS work, uses locally available materials.

This particular project attaches to a hand pump and can cleanse unlimited amounts of water. Best of all, it has no moving parts, so it is less likely to break or wear down over time. It works by dripping chlorine into the water when a certain water level is reached. Then, the water comes pouring out in batches.

With one 5 liter bag of chlorine, and a device that costs $3 to build, you can clean 100,000 liters of water.

Here at Maker Faire Africa is Killian Deku, a Ghanaian working in the IDDS program, has created a ball valve chlorine doser with the help of his team mates from India, the US and Tanzania. Their only real costs were the ball valve and the time taken to create the bamboo structure that holds it. The one variable cost is the bag of chlorine used to cleanse the water.

Ball Valve Chlorine Water Cleanser from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

We’ve got a lot of plastic trash all over Africa, especially in the cities. A team from IDDS (Amit Gandhi from the US, and Mark Driordan from the UK) decided to create a way to add value to waste plastic by using a low-cost process to transform it into something useful: plastic sheets. From these sheets can be made a number of other products. On display they had shoes, bags, pencil cases and folders.

The sheets can be made from 3ply to 40ply in thickness, and the cost of assembly is minimal.

Turning waste plastic into plastic sheets from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

Pedal-Powered Hacksaw in Ghana from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

It cost Bernard about $45 to create the bicycle powered hacksaw and one day to fabricate.

Bernard’s been a bicycle mechanic for 3 years, and has been teaching students in Tanzania to fix them for the last couple. He was invited to IDDS and met a Guatemalan attendee that had some very interesting designs using bicycles. After seeing those, he realized that he could make similar tools and devices for the needs of people in Arusha.

(more pictures from Maker Faire Africa on Flickr)

Since that time, Bernard has created a windmill, cell phone charger, drill press and a pump – all working off of bicycle parts and mechanisms.

His bicycle powered water pump. It sits by the side of the road for kids to jump on and pedal:

A chair made from bicycle parts:

January: The Sachet Kebab
Decreasing litter and polution. People can collect water sachets off the ground easily with a pole and spiked end. It can be placed along the roads, and a lot of trash can just be spiked on the tip of it.

February: Hydro Electric
Generate electricity by using the bags to create small turbines.

March: Light absorbent and heat absorbent bags
They also had a crazy idea of drinking the water, peeing in the bag and selling that to farmers for fertilizer… to much laughter…

April: Potting and a Wallet
Drink the water and make it empty. Cut the top off and put in soil and grow small plants. Take another bag and put a small hole in it for drip irrigation. Second idea: use the bag to put your money in for when it rains.

May: The individual water-shower packet and a purse
Hang the water and put a small hole in it. Create a purse out of it to hold a camera or mobile phone.

June: Waterbelt, glasses strings
They’ve created some really interesting spectacle (glasses) holder. Also, a waterbelt to hold the water as you’re moving around.

July: Water purifier
Uses the light from the sun to help purify the water. It takes a bottle top cut off and used as a funnel as well. It’s shaped like a train, for marketing reasons.

August: Kids toys
Make small airplanes and hats for children and an hourglass made from 2 water bags.

September: Drip irrigation and a pillow
Puncture a bottle or a bag on top to collect water, then use for drip irrigation. Also fill multiple old empty bags with air and put them inside a pillow case to create a pillow.

October: Drip irrigation
Starts with a bag, then a tube made of old empty bags that can direct the water further and over more areas.

November: Water resistant mobile phone case
“Your phone case is not water resistant, ours is. Clap for us.”
“We have created a water wallet, not just a plastic money carrier.”

December: Water sachet lighting system and a sachet wrist watch band
Put full bags on your roof that diffuses the light and warms the water.

This morning at Maker Faire Africa, after a short introduction by Nii Simmonds and Emeka Okafor, the team (MFA sponsors) from AndSpace Labs have been moderating a “show and tell” by some of the Makers (which is what we’re calling those who are demo’ing at the event).

William Kamkwamba: Windmills

First up was William Kamkwamba, who is really seen as a success story of this type of microentrepreneur or innovator in Africa. His windmills and the story behind it are an inspiration for many here, especially the aspiring makers with good ideas and their first prototypes. There is now a book, a documentary and a foundation all set up around the inspired story of windmills from Malawi.

The crowd LOVES William. The Africans are so inspired by him due to it being done on his own without a bunch of outside help. This means from the expats who do a lot of good work of course, which is a good point. How much more exciting is it to see home-grown ingenuity and innovation making it big than it is if it’s imported in from overseas?

IDDS: Ghana

The International Develpment Design Summit has been going on for the last 4 weeks in Kumasi, Ghana. Two members of the team came up to talk about one of the devices that they created from local materials, that will be here at the show as well. It’s a device that allows you to store your food so that it doesn’t spoil as quickly. To see more of the IDDS work, here are the final presentations from earlier this week.

Pat Delaney: Multimachine

“You can have no industrial progress without machine tools.” He’s here to show how you can start from nothing except a pipe with three holes in it and an old/broken engine block, and create a universal machine tool. His is called the Multimachine. Due to weight constraints he couldn’t bring a complete machine, so he brought the rudimentary drills and 200 DVDs full of instructions to the event.

Finally, Pat makes a call for someone to create cheaply and widely available welding glasses. Why? Because so many people in Africa are using sunglasses to weld, but it ruins your eyes in 3-4 years and you can’t weld anymore. This is terrible due to it taking 10 years to become a master welder.