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AfriGadget
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11:34
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
Happy New Years everyone!
(The following series of images were sent in by Teddy (aka TMS Ruge) a professional photographer and an all around amazing individual who runs Project Diaspora.)
The SUV was made from an old Cooking Oil container, I can’t remember the brand. The “top” is cut-out and they put other little belongs in there pulled it for hours. The wheels are made from old slippers, or sandles. Spokes from an old bicycle served as the axles. Banana stalk was used to pull the “vehicle”.
“That’s my niece, Chris and her friend, Geofrey are in the picture. They spent hours in their own world pulling it across the yard.”
More pictures at the AfriGadget Flickr Image Pool and the AfriGadget Facebook Group. (join it, add yours).
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11:36
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
Thanks to the kindness of AfriGadget readers we were able to take a simple idea and far exceed expectations. We were looking for a mobile phone for our two young ladies in South Africa to start doing some AfriGadget mobile phone reporting on. Instead, we raised extra money and had 2 more smart phones given directly to the project!
What Next?
We’re off to the races with the Sony Ericsson C702 that you helped us buy, and the Nokia N95 that David Sasaki provided to Zintle and Lukhona when he was in South Africa earlier this month (pictured above).
The new phone from Michele is going into my bag with my Nokia N95 as I try to find another two mobile reporters in some other countries in Africa. I’ve got one eye on a likely candidate in Kenya, but want to try to get outside my normal stomping grounds in East Africa. If you have an idea of someone who has a good multimedia eye, likes to tell stories and would be good for AfriGadget, send them my way please.
Phones
These two individuals went far beyond what we expected and actually gave their Nokia N95’s to the project:
Michele Bowman, futurist at Fringehog (Nokia N95)
David Sasaki of Global Voices (Nokia N95)
Donations
We tried to raise $500, and received $595 $670… Wow, thanks!
Jean Hopkins
Ken Banks
Heather Ford
Henk Kleynhans of Skyrove
Larry Bibayoff
Nicola from the UK
Matthias Zeeb
Elizabeth Meiners
Juergen Eichholz
Andre Vermeulen
Dr. Bakali
Russ Hersman
David D’Angelo of Serac Films
Alex Sauriol
Tielman Nieuwoudt
Georgia Popplewell
Ian Reclusado
Maxime Biais
Matt Heffron
Again, a big thank you to everyone who helped make this a reality. Let’s see if we can grow AfriGadget from the grassroots up.
(If your name isn’t linked above, and you would like it to be, please send me the URL you would like me to attribute it to)
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16:11
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
Madmoet Abrahams has been living and working on the street for more then 20 years now. He found a great way to make a living. Everyday you’ll find him in the streets of Cape Town, South Africa collecting White paper. 1 KG of White paper will pay him 23 South African Rand (approximately $2.35) at the paper scrap yard.
Per day he makes more or less 50 Rand. He is a hard worker. I met him in the pouring rain, which didn’t stop him from spitting through the bins in search for more paper. He saved money and bought a bicycle for 300 Rand last year. The bicycle, in combination with his creative re-use of a wheeled carriage for babies connected to it, allows Madmoet to make twice as much money per day! His big dream is to have a paid job and a house.
This friendly, clever and hard working man can be reached under the Sunlam bridge in Cape Town or somewhere on the street…
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4:44
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
Franco Mithika works in Gikomba, an industrial area in greater Nairobi. His job is to take scrap metal tin cans and a soldering iron to fabricate paraffin lamps. Paraffin lamps are used by millions of Kenyans, especially those who cannot afford or get electricity into their home for lighting.
It costs about 110/= Kenyan shillings to make, and it sells for around 150/= ($1.90). You can buy them wholesale for 1550/= ($20) for 24 pieces. It takes about a minute to make one (less for the truly gifted fabricators).
Here is a video of him making one:
Thinking about the unofficial recycling industry
What’s particularly interesting here, is that this scrapes the surface of a rather larger recycling industry that hums beneath the surface of the city. How it works is this. The youngest and poorest go around the city and collect scrap metal of all types. These are then taken to a buyer who sorts them into their different types. This is who people like Franco then buy from and create their wares.
The scrap metal picked up gets sold for just a few shillings per kilo. When sorted, the tin cans that Franco buys, are sold for 300/= ($4) per kilo.
So, there’s a rather efficient system at work. It’s run by entrepreneurs who figure out a way to make things work. A byproduct is that everything (metal) is used, and much less waste than there would be otherwise.
Gathering and transporting the scraps:
The scrap sorting place (Kawangware):
The cans for the paraffin lamps sorted:
Other “sorted” scrap metal items:
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12:22
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
If you donated before your funds never made it to us and are lying unclaimed in your PayPal account. Please consider re-sending that money via the new widget below. (this one does work, I have tested it)
The Grassroots Reporting Project is one of the initiatives that we’ve been talking about for a little while here at AfriGadget. It’s where we put smarter mobile phones into the hands of young Africans and get them to report AfriGadget stories. We’re at a point now where we’ve identified the right people, what we need is your help in raising $500 to make it happen.
The pilot project
As this is our pilot project, we want to start small and learn lessons before we expand to other parts of the continent. Our first group is made up of some youth from the Khayelitsha township outside of Cape Town. Local blogger Frerieke van Bree is acting as their blogging and multimedia mentor as they are taught how to find and tell stories about local inventors, innovators and local people doing ingenious things around Cape Town.
Two of the individuals that will be taking part in the program are Lukhona Lufuta and Zintle Sithole. Both live in Khayelitsha Township near Cape Town. They are 12th grade students who are part of a 12 week leadership program called COSAT (Centre of Science and Technology, a High school for science, IT and Math).
What the money is for
We had originally thought to use the Nokia N95 that we were so kindly given by Pop!Tech, this is a fairly costly device to have an accident happen to, so we have decided to ask the AfriGadget community help us purchase the Sony Ericsson C702. According to Frerieke,
“The phone that was most convincing to me due to it’s nice robust appearance - no sliding or flipping to open, it’s solid, easy to use, doesn’t look too fancy and it is splash and dust resistant (useful in the sandy township).”
Your part
We could use your help in a number of areas. First and foremost, just help spread the word about the project. If this pilot project turns out well, we’ll be doing this in many other untapped parts of the continent, and we’ll need even greater support.
Second, donate using the Chipin widget above, or to main@afrigadget.com
Lastly, thank you for being part of this community, for helping it get traction and grow all over the world.
[Update: After talking with support at ChipIn, they told me it is no longer supported, unless you create it through their new service SproutBuilder. I have done this, and a new widget is available above.]
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11:11
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
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)
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4:40
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
There are few things that make me madder than seeing lorry loads of charcoal going into schools, hospital and other institutions in Kenya. These places are wrecking havok on our natural environment because they need energy for cooking - but wont use clean (but more expensive) options like butane gas. Another thing that really irks me is the plastic waste that is taking over our country, it is disgusting, unhygenic and am environmental disaster that we not only drive by, or walk past every single day - we contribute to it through our negligent shopping habits (how many times does a lump of butter have to be bagged in Nakumatt?).
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
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12:43
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
Sometimes when you’re walking around Africa you come upon something that at first appears mundane. Then, upon second glance, you realize it is actually is mundane - but it’s still interesting.
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.]
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9:34
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
This weekend I’m at Brown University in Rhode Island for A Better World by Design, a conference focused on answering the question, “How can we use technology to improve the world?” The line up of speakers is quite impressive. I’ll be speaking tomorrow on AfriGadget during in the time slot allocated on technologies that can kickstart economies. I speak after my new friend Paul Polak and before my old friend Ken Banks in the morning.
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…).
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16:12
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
 Togolese inebriation innovation
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.
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18:32
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
Straying from the usual fare for a couple days, I wanted to post an interview that I did with Rob Katz, who runs a blog focused on businesses and entrepreneurs who are creating wealth at the “bottom of the pyramid” - those that make up the poorest 1 billion on the planet. It’s called NextBillion.net
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.
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12:09
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
Katharine Houreld has filed an AP story describing how the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a private game reserve ranch in Kenya and Save the Elephants, an NGO dedicated to the survival of the species are using the combination of a GSM/GPS based home brew animal collar solution to track and monitor movements of elephants and other animals.
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
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16:36
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
A couple weeks ago one of our inspirations for AfriGadget - Emeka Okafor of Timbuktu Chronicles - put forward an idea on the Ned forums about a “Maker Faire Africa“.
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:
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]
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5:03
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
When you visit Diani Beach, Kenya’s version the Florida keys, look up and you’ll see 20 rope bridges swinging over the highway - what’s that little bulge with a tail? Before you flash by, you will realise that it’s a monkey sitting up there. Yes it’s watching you! And then, a burst of action as an entire troop of black and white might start galloping across the wildly swaying bridge!
 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)
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0:51
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
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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.]
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9:44
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
“I feel good when I do these things.”
One of my favorite stories on AfriGadget has been of Philip Isohe and his hobby of making very detailed (and working) model airplanes and buses made from scratch. Earlier this year, the ArtBots Show contacted me to get Philip to create one for them that they could show at their annual show in Dublin, Ireland that is happening this weekend. The airplane will be given away as a prize at the show.
They also asked me to create a video of Philip to use at the show:
Philip with the final airplane, painted and working:
The original story of Philip, done last summer.
More images on Zoopy and our Flickr group.
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5:35
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
 Kibera from space
Google Earth is one way to appreciate the crush in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum. Not surprisingly popular images of people living in desperate conditions aren’t far from the truth when it comes to this corner of Nairobi - but out of the madness comes a little hope.
 Raw sewage flows above ground
I witnessed some amazing innovations in Kibera and conclude that people have adjusted to their situation and are making the most of it. Because of the stress associated with limitations on land, energy, water, and food the people have found innovative ways of surviving. This post is mainly about farming.
Vertical farming
like this guy and his vertical garden which feeds his family and he even sells some produce. It’s a variation on what JKE wrote about in the post on Keyhole gardens in Botswana.
 Like the key hole garden of Swaziland, this veggie patch serves a family on a tiny piece of land
Finding land in rubbish
Now a local organic farming company Green Dreams has been documenting the progress of transforming a garbage dump to an organic farm on the Green Dreams blog. They are working with a local youth group comprising reformed criminals in converting garbage into organic manure, and garbage dumps into organic farms.
 Before the clean up and farming
 Clearing land of garbage
 installing irrigation
Irrigation taps the mains water and supplies nutrient rich feeds from organic fertilizer produced on the site from crops and worms, yes they harvested local earthworms to start vermiculture.
 Worm farm - just a tray with kitchen wastes feeds a bunch of earthworms that produce organic liquid manure
 Planting seedlings, cleared waste is bundled under shade cloth and planted with pumpkin to create a green soil erosion barrier
Check out the planting implements, a PVC Pipe adapted to deliver seeds into a perfectly dug hole! This was invented to help with the back breaking work of planting.
 Scarecrow
 Garbage dump transformed this is the Kibera organic farm - 3 months after clearing the dump
After 3 months the community of 30 families were harvesting, eating and selling organic produce. Yum! Impossible to ignore how a dirty dump turned green, everyone wants a farm in Kibera now. This group is now selling their expertise to raise funds and help others.
Natural Bean Tenderizer
There was a smouldering fire where banana leaves were being reduced to ash, then the ash dissolved in water and the brown murky astringent solution sold for Ksh 50 ($.80) per 250 ml in vodka bottles! This is a bean tenderizer reducing the time to boil red kidney beans by 50%! Imagine the savings on charcoal/fuel.
Safe Dispensing of Fuel
 Kerosene is dispensed from a caged petrol pump for security
Notice that there was no protection around the farm or it’s equipment. Apparently the reputation of these ‘reformed criminals’ is enough of a deterrent.
 Kids in Kibera
Life might be hard in Kibera but yet when you visit you can’t ignore the vibrancy, colorfulness, camaraderie amongst the inhabitants it was one time that I got the feeling that people here love life
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19:18
From: AfriGadget
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Here’s an interesting simple, low-maintenance technology:
“Elephant Pumps” that were introduced to rural areas in Zimbabwe and Malawi during the last few years. These rather simple, enhanced rope pumps (based on an ancient Chinese technology) where designed for use in rural areas, where the supply of readymade spare parts isn’t that easy.
 Cycle option on an Elephant Pump
Now, what makes the Elephant Pump so different from the other popular low-maintenance pump “Afripump” is that it’s locally assembled and maintainable by the local community. Both systems - Afripump and Elephant Pump - may have their pro & cons (80-100m depth, high durability, low-maintenance vs. <40m depth, simple design, cheaper), but I especially like the “bicycle option” added to pumps which were built for schools:
On school pumps Pump Aid often incorporates a “bicycle” system onto the Elephant Pump since this has proved enormously popular with children. Most children in Zimbabwe have never had the chance to ride a bicycle so can even come to school early to “play” on the pump thereby helping to fill the school water tanks. The job of collecting water, once a tiresome chore, becomes fun and children no longer have to leave their classrooms to walk miles carrying buckets of water on their heads from a distant muddy pool.
The British Charity Org “Pump Aid“, which has in the past introduced and promoted these systems in Zimbabwe and Malawi for the costs of GBP 250 (~ USD 460, EUR 310) each, also created a very informative video on how the technology actually works:
“The Elephant Pump yields about one litre of clean water every second for an average well depth of 20 metres.”
It’s simple, it works, it wins! 
[h/t NextBillion.net]
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12:18
From: AfriGadget
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Bush camping is one of the greatest pleasures of living in Kenya – only if you have the right equipment. On a recent hastily planned trip to Lake Magadi hot springs we discovered too late that we’d forgotten the jiko (charcoal cooking stove). Stopping in Magadi town which serves only one industry, the Magadi Soda Company, we had one made for us right there and then in a very active jua kali workshop.
 It starts with a discarded gas cylinder
I always wondered where the metal for jiko’s came from - In this the many discarded gas cylinders are chopped into segments to make up the body of the jiko.
Welding the finishing touches
There seems to be no power shortage here, a mess of electric cables and metal and wooden waste remnants from the soda company is an active business for about 20 artisans making furniture, gates, and jikos for the staff of the soda company.
Everything was home made including the tools
 Corporate safety message hasn't quite translated
A ten minute job turned out into a one hour event and a thousand shillings later ($20) we take off proudly with our extremely heavy stove. That’s when we discover that there is no charcoal to be had in this part of the world anyway. We ended up with a 3 stone fire.
A flat piece of salty earth was our camp at the "Community campsite"
At dinner time we realized that we’d forgotten most of the food anyway ( camping note to Paula: don’t believe him when he says “I already put it in the car” ).
Magadi is spectacular for bird viewing
Nevertheless, the hot springs were fabulous.
Don't believe the guide books version of the hot springs as "tepid" - these springs are excruciatingly hot
The Jiko came home and has not yet been used - and thinking about it now … should I be worrying about cooking on something made from gas cylinders? Is it just iron or could there be lead in this?
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22:08
From: AfriGadget
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Or How to get your camel milk to market in 40 degree C climate.
My brother Dominic Wanjihia invented this gadget which he calls Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
Fine Lined Evaporative Cooler, for rural application in Somalia - the cooling of camels milk for transportation . He was working on a project for VETAID, Somali Pastoral Dairy Development Program - SPDDP,in Burao, Somalia June 2008. All this content belongs to Dominic who has allowed me to post it here- please seek his permission to use this content elsewhere dwanjihia@yahoo.com
 Cool-box design Fine Lined Evaporative cooler
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Evaporative cooling technology
The evaporative cooling concept has been used for centuries in countless applications. Cooling occurs when a fluid changes state from liquid to vapor. Put simply, evaporation. In order to evaporate, the liquid requires energy or heat. It acquires this heat energy from its immediate surrounding. As the surrounding gives up this heat, it lowers in temperature or cools.
The rate at which evaporation occurs depends largely on two main factors, the amount of heat available and the humidity in the air.
The cooler must also be shaded from direct sunlight otherwise the surfaces absorb UV heat and warms up, becoming ineffective as a cooler.
In short
Evaporative cooling devices work most efficiently in windy, dry and shaded conditions
Charcoal cooler
Everyone knows how to make charcoal fridges. After carrying out extensive tests on evaporative coolers in hot arid Burao, Somaliland, with day temperatures as high as 36OC in the shade, the charcoal would absorb ambient heat from the air and as opposed to cooling, would warm up the interior compartment.
Imagine wearing a wet thick winter jacket under the palms at a breezy beach. The jacket acts as a wetsuit and will insulate your body preventing heat from escaping.
Fine lined cooler
However, imagine wearing a wet skintight t-shirt in similar conditions. The water evaporates quite rapidly and cools your body.
I applied this concept to the cooler prototype pictured and achieved startling results. The cooler would drop as low as 15.5OC at night when temperatures averaged 25OC and maintain under 17OC during the day at average temps of + 32OC.
 Evapocooler
Construction
An elevated metal box is lined interior and exterior with a fabric. In this case I used locally available corrugated galvanized iron sheets for the container and sisal sacking fabric for lining. The upper ends of the fabric overhang in a water trough that rings the top of the cooler. Capillary action causes the water to slowly trickle over the inner and outer surfaces. A small vent keeps the interior air circulating and wind guides or tunnels direct air flow over the exterior surfaces. A low speed small solar powered fan can be incorporated in areas where there is not a constant breeze.
How it works
The circulating air in the interior causes evaporation on the wet surfaces. The necessary energy is acquired from the contents hence cooling them and is transfers to the iron sides.
Wind guides or tunnels direct an airflow over the external sides. The evaporation that occurs acquires energy from the sides causing further cooling of the interior.
 Convection current system to increase water bath cooling
Construction design
Cool-box with water-bath interior for rapid milk cooling application– Collection Point Cooler
Walk-in cold-room for vegetable storage
Vehicle mounted for long distance transporters
Features (Comparison to conventional charcoal coolers)
Very simple construction
Corrugated galvanized iron or GI sheets increase the surface area
Wind tunnels guide air flow efficiently over evaporation surfaces
Air flow coolers at tunnel entrances
Being galvanized, the sheets are long lasting
GI sheets are affordable and available in most rural areas
Secondhand sacking fabric is available in virtually every vegetable market
The simple capillary action dripping system replaces more complicated dripping apparatus
Convection current system to increase water-bath cooling efficiency
 Cool box design with waterbath for rapid drop in temperature of milk
 The design simplified
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In hot arid regions, cooling the warm ambient air before it reaches the wet evaporation surfaces increase efficiency. Note. Setup for airflow from either direction
 level coolers – achieved low’s of 16OC at ambient temp of 30OC +
 Rapid Temperature Drop Test 4 lts boiling water in aluminum milk churn placed in water-bath at 16OC
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For further information and other rural development concepts and innovative designs, Dom can be reached on
mobile tel +254 722 700 530 dwanjihia@yahoo.com
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14:29
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
Ruud Elmendorp, a video journalist living in East Africa, has done a more in depth interview with the young Morris Mbetsa who we recently talked about with his mobile phone-based car security system.
“You don’t need a computer, you don’t need a monthly subscription fee, you just need your mobile phone.”
He’s now looking to start a company that manufactures and installs these systems in Kenya.
[Blog link | Video link]
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2:12
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
On a recent trip to the worlds greatest natural wonder (well, ok, one of!), the wilderbeeste migration in the Masai Mara, we had the pleasure of discovering an extraordinary bush vehicle repair outfitters in the lovely slum village of Talek, after our extortionately expensive rental car suffered from not one, but three flat tyres.
If you haven’t been to the Mara during the spectacular migration, then you might find it hard to imagine our frustration - try rousing 5 kids and 4 adults at 5 am, pack them and lunch and head off to the Mara River to witness for the first time in our lives, the crossing of thousands of wilderbeeste, zebra, gazelles, lions, - images of crocodiles leaping for the bleating calves … adrenaline racing with anticipation…..and then “poof”, a flat, right at the edge of the Mara reserve.
No big deal right - just change the tyre and continue. Five minutes delay? No, 3 hours later, we’re screaming at the rental agent because the key for the spare tyre’s lock does not work! Aaarrrggghhhh
With second car we head to Talek hardly expecting to find an outfitter who can repair tubeless tyres.
This is what we found.
 Finding punctures in a converted wheel barrow - there were 15!
A modified wheel barrow full of silty water and a bit of detergent to find the holes. We stopped counting a 15 - it was very depressing! I don’t even remember going over a thorn bush either!Should have been my first warning - these tyres were seriously worn and thin.
The air compressor system comprised a tank and engine and a compressor unit - the last part was an adaptation from an airconditioning unit off a vehicle! Very creative.
 Modified compressor
In the end we had to opt for converting a tubeless tyre into a tube tyre - and this is the gizmo that was used to remove the tyre. It was completely home made and very effective. We found an old inner tube with just about the right dimensions at one of the tented camps, 350 shillings and 3 hours later we were on the road again!
 Once back on the road Mara never fails to impressWe witnessed the crossing
 Wildebeeste crossing the Mara River
It was well worth the hell to get to the crossing point - and of course this is where we experienced puncture no. 2! Crazy place for a puncture as you aren’t allowed to step out of your car while animals are crossing. Hours later It was back to Talek jua kali puncture repair for us!
 Yeah, the predators were in good form too
After 3 days of stunning experiences we headed back to Nairobi on what may easily be described as the worlds worst road. That was where the new tubed tyre went totally bezerk on us and exploded ripping the tube completely in half! Turns out the tyres were so worn that the wires in the tyre simply ripped the tube open. Nice one!
We discovered that the spare lock could be opened with a good whack! with a tyre spanner and off the lock fell. Away we went.
Words of advice to anyone renting a 4×4 to go on a major trek to Mara or anywhere in Kenya - check everything before you go, take rental company managers personal cell no with and make sure you have credit and full phone charge, take a second car if you can, and a fundi (without my brother I’d probably still be on the road side - thanks a million Dom!). Despite the annoying hassles of the rental car and the unbelievable road, the trip was well worth it. I refused to pay for the lost day and was so glad to see the back of that damn rental car - the agency didn’t quarrel. Gonna buy my own safari car now.
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12:04
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
A couple weeks ago, on a trip to Cambridge (US), Clark Boyd of The World sat down with me to do a quick interview and to grab some pictures from my most recent trip to Kenya for a slideshow. Here are the results (you can definitely tell a pro is behind this production):
[Direct slideshow link - higher quality]
Courtesy of Clark Boyd, Technology Correspondent for The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. For Clark’s weekly technology podcast, visit www.theworld.org/technology.
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9:04
From: AfriGadget
Read This Entry & More At AfriGadget
Hello - I’m new to Afrigadgets and look forward to sharing the interesting innovations we come across every day.
A small group of innovative conservationists have come up with a solution to save the Virunga National Park in eastern Congo from destruction by charcoal producers who are | |
