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It seems Africa is a place of endless ingenuity. There are countless amazing projects happening to help people in rural and poverty-stricken areas improve their lives, and we're always learning about not only innovative ideas, but also ways to better understand how Africa integrates with our daily lives. Here are eight top projects you want to have on your radar.
1. Solar Cookers Taking Hold in Africa
Cooking stoves are a major source of pollution from places like Africa, since fuels like kerosene, firewood and charcol are often used and let off greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore clean cooking technologies are a major focus for the health of the planet and the people using the technologies.
Sol Suffit is working to bring its super-clean and super-simple solar cooker to developing nations, replace the environmentally harmful cooking methods that rely on dirty fuels. The project is moving across the continent, and the first model, called the "Solar CooKit," costs only around $6.77 to produce. So far, 500 have been produced in Tanzania, and 1,000 in Senegal. Made from cardboard and aluminum foil - including foil made from recycled Tetra Pak materials and surplus from a packaging plant in Holland.
2. EGG Energy Creates Battery-Sharing Program
EGG Energy has created a new system that could make getting battery power easier than ever. Taking a cue from Better Place, the company is starting up a battery sharing program with a structure similar to Netflix - a person can pick up a battery at a nearby station, use it until the charge is gone, then go drop it off and pick up a fully charged battery with ease. This means affordable lighting for the home so children can do school work, or a fully charged cell phone battery so families can keep in touch for everything from the status of their crops to health care.
The subscription-based service starts with a $27 membership for the first year's subscription service. An additional $0.40 is charged per battery swap. The battery will help the user charge their lights, cell phones, radios, and other household devices. Starting in rural Tanzania, EGG Energy is hoping to spread across Africa and into other countries where inexpensive, easy-to-access power is needed. The company has already created the first distribution center and signed on over 60 members. They feel it's just a matter of time before the business takes off.
3. An Energy-Sipping Cellular Network To Be Deployed in Africa
Over 80% of Africans live without access to the electricity grid - which is why projects like EGG Energy listed above are so important. Yet, despite the lack of electricity, over 1/3 of the population owns a cell phone and that portion is rapidly growing. Developing nations are leapfrogging from no phone to cell phones - skipping the expensive and unnecessary infrastructure of land lines - and the use of mobile phone technology for everything from agriculture to banking services to health care is helping to improve the quality of life of people living in these areas. However, it still takes a cell phone base station to connect the mobile devices, and those take power. Luckily, there's one new model that takes minimal power, and it's coming to Africa.
A cell phone base station that uses as little as 50 watts of solar generated power has been developed by VNL, a telecom company based in Haryana, India. The base stations - which can range from requiring 50 to 150 watts of power - are easy to assemble, requiring only two people to assemble and mount on a rooftop in just six hours. That makes these ideal for use in rural villages, and the units will soon be sold in Africa, where sunshine is plentiful. Customers can spend just $2 a month to access the service, as opposed to the average $6 per person required to make traditional systems cost effective. Not only is it cheaper, but it's also using a clean source of energy. ABI Research predicts that over 335,000 solar-powered base stations from VNL and other companies will appear worldwide by 2013, with 40,000 of those being completely autonomous and off-grid. 4. Energy-Generating Soccer Ball to Power Lamps, Save Lives in Africa A soccer ball that generates and stores energy while it's being kicked around is the latest idea for generating energy for that all-important tool: the light. Generates enough energy to power an LED light or charge a small electronic device may not seem like much, but in Africa, it could literally mean the difference between life and death. Kerosene lamps are both incredibly common, and incredibly harmful to human health, creating gasses that equate to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. As popular as kerosene lamps, however, is the game of soccer. That's where the sOccket comes in. So far the sOccket is in prototype mode. It uses an inductive coil mechanism similar to the technology found in shake-to-charge flashlights. By kicking the ball around, a magnet is forced through a metal coil, creating a charge. For each 15 minutes of play, the ball can store enough energy to illuminate a small LED light for three hours. That's impressive. While not equal to regulation soccer balls, it will certainly suffice in villages that need alternative lighting sources. The design team is currently working on getting it past the prototype stage an into production where it can move into a buy-one-give-one program to overcome the distribution hurdle. 5. Light UP Malawi Aiming To Switch A Whole Country To Clean Energy sOccket isn't the only project working to get better lighting to Africans. Light Up Malawi is a project striving to take one of the world's poorest donations off the grid and on to reliable, sustainable power sources. Only 2% of the country's residents have access to electricity, but that can change. Currently working on getting funding, the project hopes to work with existing parties on the ground in Malawi, as well as other partner programs that focus on clean energy access and poverty alleviation. By looking directly at policy, the organization will create a program that links up providers of alternative energy solutions to easy-to-run pilot programs. It's a huge goal - putting an entire nation on renewable power. But it's possible! The group thinks it will take about a year to get a profit model, and enough funds from foundations helping get communities on board. And you can help by making a donation! According to Light Up Malawi, "The people of Malawi will benefit three-fold: 1) Receive products at low or no cost, subsidized by grant funding and donations we will raise that will improve their lives. 2) Become entrepreneurs and product evangelists if they choose and 3) Participate in the design process instead of being designed AT. All of this makes Malawi a capital for clean energy." 6. Farm-In-A-Backpack Project Hopes to Feed Sub-Sahara Africa Rachel Zedeck is the mastermind behind a new program that is working to give Kenyans all the tools they need for environmentally friendly, self-sufficient agriculture - and everything fits in one backpack. Contained in the single backpack is all the necessary materials to get started in farming, including seeds of drought resistant and local crop varieties, a drip Irrigation Kit, and optional 500 Liter collapsible water tank, Lachlan "Fusion Nutrition Program," plant nutrition in combination with eco-friendly chemistry, Parathyroid-based Malaria Pesticide, small farm tools, customized with the final crop production models, and a six liter chemical sprayer along with training manuals and a journal. A person is handed a backpack, and along with it, lessons on how to use the contents. The goal is that they'll be able to immediately start growing their own food. The project works to spread knowledge about sustainable farming practices, which will then help to preserve the delicate African ecosystems and keep forests from being cleared for additional land as farmland is degraded through poor practices. The idea is intriguing and Zedeck is working hard to raise the needed funding - much of which likely depends on the success of the pilot program with a group of farmers in the Mau Forest. 7. Solar-Powered Irrigation Creates a Harvest of Plenty in Sub-Saharan Africa How crops are irrigated is a huge component in sustainable farming - and in crop yield. A project in Benin led by Stanford University compared the agricultural yields of three solar-powered water pumps (two for surface water and one to access groundwater 25 meters below the surface) with those of villages in which irrigation was done by hand, the predominant method used to water crops throughout the region. The findings were stunning, with 1.9 tons a month of produce grown, and women keeping an average of 18% of their crop a month, which means more food in their family's mouth without a profit loss. Unfortunately, there's no mention in the study of a plan to boost supplies of and distribute the solar pumps, but if there is a project worth looking into forwarding, this is it. If the research team can figure out how to distribute the solar pumps more widely where needed, sub-Saharan Africa during the dry season will be a much more well-fed, prosperous, and still water-efficient place. 8. Appfrica Maps Coltan From Congo to Your Cell Phone This isn't necessarily a project in Africa, but about Africa - and about an incredibly important issue in Africa: mineral mining. We all use minerals from Africa on a daily basis; for example, coltan is our cell phones, computers, the military uses it in weapons, it's everywhere. Except it exists in the earth in just a few places, including The Democratic Republic of Congo where it is considered a conflict mineral. It's hard to know where minerals are coming from and how we can avoid conflict minerals, but thankfully Appfrica is helping to change that. Appfrica Labs "facilitates and incubates technology entrepreneurs in East Africa." The map they've created for coltan traces the mining of it from the Kivu area of DRC, through the hands of illegal traders in neighboring countries, to refinery plants in East Asia, to the products we buy from Apple, Nintendo, HP, Sony, Nokia, etc. Appfrica made the map by combining data from reports on the mining of coltan and from Ushahidi, a crowd-sourced crisis information and mapping project. You can also trace materials by using SourceMap.
