The Swahili bed was in a recent article on MAKE Magazine (a publication that inspired AfriGadget’s creation). In it they discuss why this style of bed is so useful on the hot and humid East African coast.

“In Kenya, the most common and most useful piece of furniture is the rot- and bedbug-resistant Swahili bed.”

“In most houses, you can only find one type of furniture: the Swahili bed. It’s used as a couch, bed, table, and everything else. It’s comfortable and perfect for the hot, humid climate.”

The beds are made from locally grown mvuli or mbamba kofi trees, then straps are created out of palmetto leaves which are soaked in salt water and woven into rope.

Years ago I used to export furniture like this from East Africa, so it’s something that I happen to know quite a bit about. Which provides yet another lesson for those of us who live, or work, in Africa. That is, items that seem mundane to us, as we live our lives in Africa, can be quite exceptional if we only stop to really look.

(via Timbuktu Chronicles)

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, 

turning rubbish into energy

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.”

Any one for a cuppa?

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

Such was the case when I passed a shoeshiner (who didn’t want to be in the picture). On his stall there was an old, keyless keyboard, and it just didn’t seem to fit. He then told me that it serves as a perfect shoe holder that keeps the shoe polish and repair materials off of him, and as a simple non-slip surface.

Think of it as a laptop desk for shoes.

Here’s another shot:

[See more images like this on the AfriGadget Flickr group.]

Thoughts from some of the speakers

(Note: I’ll likely keep this as a running liveblog today - as much as I can keep up with it anyway, I’m not Ethan Zuckerman… My pictures will be up in this Flickr set.)

Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO, comes to the stage asking, “how can design have positive social impact?” They did interviews with 143 organizations and individuals and came away with the following two common themes for their report (download the PDF):

“Frustration with the progress in addressing problems we all care about.”

“Design thinking can make a big contribution to the social sector.”

What is design thinking? It’s looking at problems through the lens of what is desirable by people. Design thinking contributes through empathy, prototyping and storytelling. Empathy is about connecting with people and seeing the world from their perspective, not yours. Prototyping is about building to think - it helps us get answers fast (drawing, legos, etc.). Storytelling is about taking key elements and making them real.

The elephant in the room - there’s a tension between wanting to do the projects and needing to run a business.

When Nature Calls - Architecture in the Face of Change

Lukas Feireiss, well known architecture author who wrote “Architecture of Change“, addresses how our new global world sees technology spread to all the corners of the earth. He talks about the solar panels attached to camels that are being used by nomads in the Sahel desert in Northern Africa for refrigeration.

A survival guide for do-gooders

Ross Evans, of Worldbike and Xtracycle is up. I’m a big fan of what Ross is doing, he lives his work.

One of his ideas was to build a bike trailer, because he thought it might be useful in Nicaragua, back in 1995. However, he found that they weren’t used much. It’s hard to get the wagon wheels and trailer’s don’t really work well with footpaths. This moved him to a new idea, which was a longer wheelbase bicycle that might work more within that cultural context.

He cautions against galloping in on a white horse. It’s really important to watch what happens after you leave. His idea is “Three - One - Three”. This idea is around intercultural iteration, from the third world to the first world, back to the third world.

“When you go to a new place, and have an open mind, then you see new things. If you’re trying to solve problems within a context you already have, you’re going to have a hard time.”

Make sure you live with the people that you’re trying to study and help through design. Do what they do - eat with your hands, sleep on the floor, whatever it takes to immerse yourself in that context.

“She who laughs, lasts” - pace yourself and have fun.

“What do you do with naysayers? Thank them for the compost.”

“Start with the assumption that they don’t need your idea.”

Cameron Sinclair, of Architecture for Humanity, is talking on creating systemic change through design.

Notes: in the wake of these disasters that happen around the world, the design and architecture community:

“We are not humanitarian workers. We are not recovery experts. We arm communities to buld base don sustainable prosperity. After an emergency, people don’t want a house, they want a job.”

It’s important to let communites “own” projects. Let them get involved in the design process, and don’t slap your branded sign on it. A “Ronald McDonald House for Tsunami Victims” strips away ownership faster than anything else. Plus, everyone expects Ronald McDonald to come fix things when they break.

The role of engineers in poverty reduction

Bernard Amadei, Founding President of Engineers Without Borders - USA and co-founder of Engineers Without Borders-International, is on stage to talk about how it’s the small, unsexy engineering projects tend to make the biggest impact.

Bernard asks, “why do engineering for the developing world?” And goes through the numbers on everything from food supply to water preservation to transportation, healthcare and waste disposal (impressive numbers).

“In the next two decades, almost 2 billion additional people will populate the earth. This growth will create demands on an unprecedented scale.”

Lights

Sheila Kennedy, of the Portable Light Project, is showing how they have created a completely customizable solar powered portable light device. She’s giving a really amazing talk about technology use around the world, and how a seemingly small thing (light), can be so game changing.

Creating Opportunities

Clarice Odhiambo, of the newly founded Africa Center for Engineering Social Solutions (ACESS). Clarice was the one running a lot of the Coca-Cola clean water projects in Africa over the last decade.

“There is no country in Africa that I haven’t been to. There has been so much aid pumped into Africa, so I asked, why is nothing changing? They are not in the situation they are in because they are lazy or dumb. They are there because they lack the supporting structures and lacking opportunities. People are idle. People with degrees and who could be working productively somewhere, but there are no opportunities.”

My motto in life is, “Don’t wait for the other person. If the world is to change, it is up to me.”

Basic principles:
It should not be about us, but the sensible thing to do for “the world we leave”. No competition - don’t just duplicate each others efforts. Collaborate for synergy. Generate income while you go about it. When we don’t pay attention and address the effects from our designs, the inevitable happens.

People engage in destructive practices - not by choice, but of necessity (deforestation, pollution, etc…).

I love African beer. I really do. Even when bad Nigerian beer knocks me down for a week, I am always back for more.

Maybe it’s the efficiency of drinking from 1/2 liter bottles or the romance of relaxing beer-in-hand while watching Simba sex. Either way, a cold Club, Tusker, or White Cap is the only way to end a day.

That’s why I’ve always noticed how beers are opened in Africa. My preference is for the minimalist method of using one bottle to open another, a trick I use to constant amazement in the lower 48.

However, most African restaurants and bars employ boring commercial bottle openers, plain and unassuming in form and function. You have to really be on the lookout to find creative beer release mechanisms - and recently I was rewarded for my vigilance.

Having a cold beer after Togo’s National Run to the Border Day sprint to the Ghanaian border, I noticed that my server was using a non-standard bottle opener.

A first in my observance, she employed two screws in a wooden peg to pop the bottle cap on my Guinness. What simplicity, ingenuity, practicality!

I was in awe until I had a thought: What if she could use only one screw?

[See more images like this on the AfriGadget Flickr group.]

Wayan Vota is part of Inveneo, a non-profit social enterprise whose mission is to get the tools of ICT into the hands of organizations and people who need them most: those in remote and rural communities in the developing world.

I had a chance to meet him last week at a conference called Pop!Tech in the United States. Many of the businesses and entrepreneurs featured on AfriGadget fit this model. If you’re interested in this subject, you’re probably already following his blog. If not, jump on over there and dig into some of the articles.

A pilot project placed an electonic collar containing GPS and GSM units on Kimani, a bull elephant who was the last surviving member of a 5 elephant group with a penchant for raiding farms to eat crops. This collar allowed park rangers to track the elephant’s movements using Google Earth / Google Maps. The project also allowed park authorities to monitor animal locations at all times and acted as a deterrent against the poaching of this important resource.

Crop raiding is a huge problem on farms bordering parks and reserves as a herd of elephants or other animals can wipe out entire crops on a single night destroying the livelihoods of the farm owners.

The coolest side benefit of the product though was when the project team figured out that they could create a virtual “geo-fence” and trigger alerts whenever Kimani the elephant stepped outside this virtual fence - an occurrence that indicated that he was probably on his way to a village to carry out some crop raiding.

The set up used a hardware and software solution that sends text based messages in real time with location data over GSM to park rangers whenever Kimani approaches a park fence that is close to a farm.

This is yet another great example of why the use of mobile phones continue to be the computing platform of choice in many ingenious and innovative homebrew technology solutions in Africa.

Click through the links below to articles and video about this project.

How Save the Elephants is using Google Earth / Google Maps to track elephant movements.

Video on how the solution works

The aim of a Maker Faire-like event is to create a space on the continent where Afrigadget-type innovations, inventions and initiatives can be sought, identified, brought to life, supported, amplified, propagated, etc. Maker Faire Africa asks the question, “What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from Mali with those from Ghana and Kenya, and add resources to the mix?”

The focus here is not on high-tech, but on manufacturing. Specifically, fabrication, the type of small and unorganized businesses that pop up wherever an entrepreneur is found on the African continent. It gets exciting when you think about gathering some of the real innovators from this sector into one place where they can learn from each other and spread their knowledge from one part of the continent to another.

A few fabrication stories on AfriGadget:

• Re-use in the Unofficial Kenya Ironworks Industry
• Junk Metal + Homemade Welder = Art?
• Homemade welding machines for use in fabrication

The organizing team will collaborate with the organizers of the International Development Design Summit (IDDS), which will be held at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in mid/late Summer 2009, to ensure a well-timed, visible, and celebratory event that draws upon IDDS outcomes and attracts new participants. The aim of Maker Faire Africa 2009 will be to establish partnerships and an organizing infrastructure that could lead to a series of events across the continent.

Needless to say, AfriGadget is 100% behind this initiative and will take an active role in both promotion and organizing, as needed.

[The Maker Faire Africa blog]

Colous on the Bridge

Colobridges were built by the Colobus Trust to save the rare Angolan colobus monkeys from road traffic accidents

Colobus road kill.."What's black and white and red all over" ... ok I agree, it's not funny.

Faced with a crisis that could eliminate the species in Kenya, innovative solutions were tried from Lollipop stick men at major monkey crossing points, roadsigns to slow down the speed, and education for taxis, stickers in matatus (local buses).

The Angolan colobus is one of Kenya's rarest and most beautiful monkeys found only in the forests of the South Coast

The bridges were the most successful. Designed locally and made of cable, rubber and PVC, each bridge takes a day to erect and costs about $500. The bridges connect two of the monkeys favourite trees on either side of the highway.

Watching the world go by

Being naturally shy, the colobus initially stared at the bridges gadgets with disdain until the more inquisitive and daring Sykes monkey began to see the logic. Once the Sykes and even vervet monkeys started using the bridges, the colobus followed suit, and are now very comfortable with their arboreal walkways.

This is an Amazing video of Colobus crossing a “colobridge” (Warning this video is GREAT but the link take you to another site - so read on first or you”ll miss the Australian madness)

There are now 23 ‘Colobridges’ and it’s estimated that they are used 150,000 time a year by at least three different species of monkeys! Amazing because there are only 300 of these Angolan colobus monkeys left in Diani where road kills are now rare.

Not for everyone: Bridges have also been deployed in Zanzibar to save the crazy looking Kirks red colobus but it looks like they aren’t clever enough to use them (some species are just slow)! Check out the photos of a confused monkey here

Confused monkey crossing on the road instead of using the bridge!

My plug for my favourite primate “Hug a colobus today”.

Colobridges go global or ‘Australia steals our African ideas’: Though they don’t admit it, the “colobridge” innovation inspired rope bridges to save freaky creatures in Australia too

No, not rats, but a family of ring tailed possums crossing a rope bridge (they look like a pack of terrified rodents to me)

Of course the Aussies always do things bigger and better… check this one out!

Mega rope bridge in Australia - it might help a koala, but not kangaroo's (I hear that road rage against roo's isn't uncommon over there)

Rendille Home - Made of USAID Food Bags, originally uploaded by whiteafrican.

From the AfriGadget Flickr Archives. A traditional Rendille home in the deserts of Northern Kenya reuses USAID bags to make their structure.

[See more images like this on the AfriGadget Flickr group.]