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.
According to a press release by Paul Riley, SCORE Project Director, the £2m Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity (SCORE) project aims to work with rural communities in Africa and Asia, where access to power is limited, to develop a versatile domestic appliance powered by biomass that will significantly improve health and welfare.
The SCORE device, which is still in the concept stage and is shown in the picture below, will work through the conversion of biomass to sound energy for heating and cooling.
This technology is far more efficient and less polluting than burning wood in an open fire, currently the primary cooking method of two billion people around the world. Dr Pullen(Research team leader) adds: “Using this technology while ensuring that the device is relatively low-cost and can be produced using local materials and labour is one of the great challenges of this project. Thermoacoustic systems have always been expensive and high-tech - a great deal of the first stage of this project will be taken up with translating the technology into something that can easily be mass produced.”
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.
Another great picture and story from Mark Steudal who sends this image and description:
This is a motorized bicycle, made in Kisumu, Kenya and purchased in Kakemega. They hold about 2 liters of petrol and can get theoretically around 50 km a liter. They cost around 7,000 Kenyan shillings. To start the bicycle you start pedaling manually, then you flip a switch on the left handle that starts the engine. Then you have a normal motorcycle throttle control on the right side.
[Note: Send in your pictures and stories showing African ingenuity using our Contact Form.]
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.
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.
A young man has created a windmill out of spare parts in Malawi.
William Kamkwamba says one day while reading he came across two books, Using Energy and How it Works, which are about generation of electricity using a windmill.
On a trial and error basis, he managed to make a small windmill which generated electricity enough to light his dorm. Seeing its success he planned for a bigger one so that his parents could benefit and some well-wishers gave him money to get some of the materials he needed.
In total, he spent a total of 2200 Malawi Kwachas, which is equivalent to $16. William is saving his family money on home lighting expenses, recharges people’s mobile phones and radio batteries, and also charges his own automobile battery for backup power.
Unlike most windmills, where the propellers 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 spins a dynamo which in turn generates electricity.
Marlies sends an email and pictures of a water buoy that has been converted into a water tank for drinking. Ingenious uses of materials that might seem odd to Westerners at first glance are common place in Africa. The picture was taken in Lamu, a small island off the coast of Kenya.
She says,
“I recently had a chance of spending some time in Lamu where i came across an interesting observation which made me think of AfriGadget. Here is a picture of a water suspender made out of a buoy - very neat idea!”
If you have any pictures or stories of African ingenuity, send them to us at “main [at] thisdomain [dot] com”
Rajan Harinarain, a South African entrepreneur and inventor has come up with a temporary foldaway house for use in emergency situations complete with electrical wiring and fittings, doors and windows that can be erected by a small team in 5 minutes.
The patented structure weighs less than a ton, collapses to under a foot in height and can be modified with insulation/ventilation for hotter or cooler environments.
The image is from Kevin Kelly’s site, it is of a wire toy made by a child in Uganda.
