This last week I had the opportunity to catch up with one of my favorite bloggers, Jan Chipchase, while we spoke together on a panel at the Global Philanthropy Forum. Jan works for Nokia as what can best be described as a design and usability ethnographer. He explores the way mobile phones are used worldwide and reports that back to Nokia’s design team. He’s a fascinating person to talk to, and I thought I might highlight some of the stories he’s come up with while exploring in Africa.
One of the consistent themes of Jan’s message is that it in each country he visits there is a booming market of hackers and mobile phone mechanics who are doing all kinds of interesting things. They are taking the designs of the West and applying them to their lives, modifying them and making them work for their local needs. From Accra to Nairobi, there is always a “cell phone alley” for you to buy, repair or customize your mobile phone.
In a post titled, “Recycled, Upcycled: Remade” he tackles the question of whether it is possible to create a phone completely of recycled parts.
Of all the internal concepts I’ve followed this year this is one I keep returning to, not least because sustainability is a pressing issue in a billion+ products-per-year industry - but also because the team tackled a number of related weighty issues in what was a far reaching project. I hope that in due course more of their design thinking makes it into the public domain, not least to stimulate critical feedback from people like your good selves.
One of the more interesting innovations is the development of a dual SIM card hack so that users can access multiple carriers.
This product has two SIM card slots in a single phone - primarily to support price sensitive/prudent consumers who wish to optimise their call costs by maintaining SIM cards from two different phone operators. As in many countries - calls to a customer using a different Ghanaian operator cost slightly more than those on the same network.
There are many more examples of mobile phone use in Africa and the ingenious solutions that locals come up with for their particular situations on Jan’s blog. The last image that I want to show is of the Village Phone project (by Grameen Bank) happening in Uganda. Jan has taken an excellent picture and annotated it with the important facts about this project in a rural Uganda.
For more information about Jan, read this recent NY Times article about him, and of course subscribe to his blog, Future Perfect.
The Universal Nut Sheller (UNS) is part of the Full Belly Project. It’s really an amazing story about a device that has had a direct impact on a number of African countries. The story goes that Jock Brandis, an American inventor, was on a trip to Mali and saw some women who had been shelling peanuts leaving them with bleeding hands. This spurred him on to create a device that would help end hunger.
The process works by centrifugal force and friction. The Universal Nut Sheller is basically a concrete cone within a cone, open at the top and bottom, with the interior cone being solid. The interior cone, or rotor, rotates on a shaft and has an attached handle (Note: only one moving part!). The user turns the handle around fast enough to spin the nuts to the outside through centrifugal force. The nuts fall between the surfaces and are rolled and squeezed, allowing the nuts and shells to fall through to the bottom. This mix of nuts and shells is then winnowed out, the old fashioned way.
Reach and Impact
According to the Full Belly Project, this machine is being used in 12 African nations, including; Mali, Uganda, Malawi, DRC, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leon, Sudan and Zambia.
The nut sheller is being used to shell more than just peanuts. As new villages take up the device, they turn it towards their own diverse nut shelling needs, such as jatropha, neem nuts, shea nuts or coffee.
Most importantly, he Universal Nut Sheller costs about $50-75 dollars to make, depending on the price of local materials, and will serve the needs of a village of 200 to 1000 people.
Like two past projects that we’ve highlighted on AfriGadget, this one is encouraging. Both the recently profiled see-saw power machine (possibly), and the KickStart pumps are based on the belief that sustainable economic growth comes through empowering local entrepreneurs to start, or extend, their businesses. In fact, the plans for the UNS are free and downloadable.
We hope you enjoy these pictures of toys from Kenya and Ghana. They are a sampling of the pictures on the AfriGadget flickr group. The materials used to make these toys are scrap metal, tins, wire, and pieces of leather.
Our friend Ken Banks of Kiwanja.net and NGOMobile wrote about the challenge of mobile phone charging in off grid Africa; noting that this solar powered charger could be one of the solutions.
I quite agree; two years ago i bought a similar solar powered charger that cost $99. The charger pictured above is made by G24 innovations, and costs $20. This is just the kind of technology that AfriGadget likes, because it is not only quite handy to have, but it is empowering and well suited for off-grid rural areas in Africa, California or anywhere with sunlight for that matter. Ken explains it best…
In some rural areas, where the lack of reliable mains power might be the difference between making it worth owning a mobile or not, a small solar panel such as this could be a deal clincher. Of course, solar energy has been touted as a solution for charging mobile devices for years now, but what’s interesting about this is the cost. Suddenly, it actually seems possible. And by possible, what I really mean is affordable.
The Bamboo Bike, an endeavour that aims at building bicycles in a sustainable fashion using bamboo as the primary construction material, is a joint project run by Craig Calfree of Calfree Design, a high tech bicycle design firm based in California and The Earth Institute at Columbia University.
The bicycle is the primary mode of transport in Africa and it is used for everything from personal transportation to moving medicine and the sick to hospital. Sadly, the design used in most of Africa has not changed for the last 40 years to take into account the different ways in which the bicycle is used. In fact, most bikes in use in most of Africa today are based on a colonial British design tailored to individuals travelling short distances on smooth roads.
While making bike frames based on bamboo is not a new idea, most bamboo frame designs simply use bamboo for construction material in a traditional bike frame design. Leveraging the unique properties of bamboo such as its strength and flexibility to meet the specific needs of populations local to various parts of Africa is one of the primary rationale behind the Bamboo Bike project.
The team working on the Bamboo Bike project in the US, Ghana and Kenya among other locations have a interesting blog (last updated in the summer of 2007) that chronicles the struggles of the project team while on site in Africa.
Project gear including Bamboo Bikes and clothing is available on the Bamboo Bike and Calfree Design websites.
Yahoo! News (among other sources) carries a story from October 21st about Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi of the Kano Plains of Nigeria who has built a working helicopter over the last 8 months using scrap aluminum and parts from a Honda Civic, an old Toyota and from the remains of a crashed Boeing 747.
This inventor has had no formal training in flying and his helicopter has never flown higher than 7 feet of the ground. In an interview, he talks about how the machine works:
“You start it, allow it to run for a minute or two and you then shift the accelerator forward and the propeller on top begins to spin. The further you shift the accelerator the faster it goes and once you reach 300 rmp you press the joystick and it takes off,”
Mubarak is ambitious however and has embarked on a new project to build a better helicopter that will be able to make 3 hour flights. He hopes to get support for his project from the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and other Nigerian government bodies.
The HAPV (Advertised as HAPPY) is a twist on the ‘horse and buggy’ mode of transportation, making this a donkey, cart, solar panel on a canopy FUV (Farm Utility Vehicle) that is quite ingenious and absolutely AfriGadget. A donkey drawn carriage is commonplace in many countries in Africa, and this retrofit by the organization Water and Wheel adds more functionality and utility especially suited for rural Africa.
Fitted with a solar panel that charges a 12 volt battery under the driver’s seat, the “HAPPY” becomes an independent, sustainable source of energy that powers cell phone connectivity, front and rear emergency lights and a small neon tube at night. Add a water filtration system, and the “HAPPY” doubles as a multi functional mobile business unit, that can empower an entrepreneurial owner, to generate income from it as a fresh water outlet, a mobile phone kiosk or a spaza shop – even after dark.
Note: Erik Hersman (White African) was interviewed a few minutes ago on BBC, a podcast will be available in a day or two and we will be sure to share it here (link).
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.
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.
One of the consistent themes of Jan’s message is that it in each country he visits there is a booming market of hackers and mobile phone mechanics who are doing all kinds of interesting things. They are taking the designs of the West and applying them to their lives, modifying them and making them work for their local needs. From Accra to Nairobi, there is always a “cell phone alley” for you to buy, repair or customize your mobile phone.
