During my first week back in Liberia I had been invited to Hawa’s birthday party, on Sembehun Beach, not far for Robertsport, so I passed some time with the ladies while they were preparing western-style food for everyone: rice, beef stake, pasta and potato salad. Then they started stirring what would have to be two cakes for the dessert, and I started wondering how they’d be able to bake them, since the only cooking apparels in the big warehouse were these coal pits on the ground.

They showed me the oven, a big metal cabinet against the far wall; looks like a refrigerator on legs, to allow a coal pit to fit under the bottom, but when I get near it, I see it’s a Blockbuster Quick Drop Booth! The front, where the slit had been closed, faces the wall and the back door is to access the oven; inside are several fridge trays, on which they lay the pans. The door is then locked with a simple bolt and sealed all around with wet cloths.

The cake was fabulous.

[Editor's note: I'm find myself incredibly curious trying to figure out where they found this... How did a Blockbuster drop box get to Liberia?]

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.

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

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.

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.

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

It starts with a discarded gas cylinder

Welding the finishing touches

Everything was home made including the tools

Corporate safety message hasn't quite translated

A flat piece of salty earth was our camp at the "Community campsite"

Magadi is spectacular for bird viewing

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?

Keyhole gardens?

Actually, I had heard about those Folkewall installations in Gabarone, Botswana the other day that are used for greywater recycling, but keyhole gardens were indeed quite new to me. Guess this also shows how many smart solutions still exist out there that will need to be rediscovered and put in use.

source: African Gardens

Keyhole gardens are a technique used to grow vegetables in a dry climate. They are actually a special form of raised bed gardens: circular waist high raised beds with a path to the center. Walled in by stones, there’s a basket made from sticks and straw in the center that holds manure and other organic kitchen waste for compost.
Since they look like a keyhole from above, they are often called keyhole gardens and also promoted under this name in Lesotho, where the charity organisation “Send a Cow” has been promoting the creation of these special gardens for some time now.

So what makes these gardens so special?

• the surrounding stones retain the rich soils and keep it safe from erosion
• the round shape retains moisture
• compact size, even small plots can be used for gardening
• raised beds enable the sick and elderly to help with the gardening work
• center in the middle is used for composting and reuse of greywater (= reuse of nutrients)

“Send a Cow” also created a very informative website on their activies and published some valuable How-to-manuals for us to adopt this smart approach. Please also check out this funny animation on YouTube which puts it in plain enligsh comic style

Now I am only curious to know if we could also mix the greywater with some collected urine and use that as additional fertilizer. In any case, keyhole gardens are a very appropriate “technology” which certainly isn’t limited to countries with a dry climate.

Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti's presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country's prime minister packing.

Haiti's hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

(Watch a video of a pedal-powered one in action)

How does it work?

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.

(Via Kaushal)

David had the idea to dig a ditch down the side of the road and channel that into two 2-meter deep water catchments. The water is used to support the plants during the dry season and he never runs out of water, even during a drought. He has also stocked the pulls with fish (Tilapia), that he and his workers eat. A third byproduct is that the rain water being diverted doesn’t further erode that part of the road.

It’s a lesson in simplicity married with low-tech ingenuity coming together for increased business profitability.

Here’s a short video, where one of my friends translates for David:

More pictures available at the Flickr AfriGadget group.

If you have any stories or pictures of African innovations and ingenuity, please contact us.