Maker Faire Africa – Page 2

Agriculture and Metal Fabrication Meet in N. Ghana

This is a corn planter. It costs approximately $10 (15 Cedis) to make, and it significantly decreases the time that it would normally take to plant corn. This invention came about by taking a look a medical pill dispensing devices and transferring that knowledge to his communities needs.

Shamsudeen (“Sham”) Napara lives in the norther part of Ghana, which is a lot more rural and isolated than the southern part of the country where you find Accra, or the central part, where you find Kumasi. He has a metal fabrication shop where he builds tools, mostly for agricultural needs of those in the surrounding areas.

He was at Maker Faire Africa this weekend and I was completely amazed at both the ingenuity and the quality of his work.

Shea Nut Roaster

That’s not all that Sham has been up to though, in fact, he’s been busy with a couple other projects. Specifically, he’s been working with Amy Herman from the Univesity of Indiana to figure out how to enhance traditional processes familiar to those in Norther Ghana. This means he does a lot with Shea nuts and the processing of them. It is one of the few fields dominated by the women in the community, and a lucrative business, since the processing from raw to refined can net a good margin of profit.

Below is a shea nut roaster – a small version, since the large ones are the size of a table. It costs around $40 (60 Cedi), and it decreases the time and energy normally expended in the work of getting the nuts ready for processing.

Soap Cutter

Though he has many more inventions in his workshop in Northern Ghana, the last of the three items that he brought to Accra was a soap cutter. It’s a device that has a hinge on one end that opens and closes with piano wires and guitar screws to hold wire tight across the device. As it is closed, it slices the soap cleanly.

Cleaning massive amounts of water with chlorine

Cleaning massive amounts of water with chlorine from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

Suprio Das is part of the water-cleansing team with Killian Deku, Laura Stupin and Bernard Kiwia. Besides the ball-valve doser, they’ve also created a siphon mechanism chlorine filter. It, like all of the IDDS work, uses locally available materials.

This particular project attaches to a hand pump and can cleanse unlimited amounts of water. Best of all, it has no moving parts, so it is less likely to break or wear down over time. It works by dripping chlorine into the water when a certain water level is reached. Then, the water comes pouring out in batches.

Ball Valve Chlorine Doser

With one 5 liter bag of chlorine, and a device that costs $3 to build, you can clean 100,000 liters of water.

Here at Maker Faire Africa is Killian Deku, a Ghanaian working in the IDDS program, has created a ball valve chlorine doser with the help of his team mates from India, the US and Tanzania. Their only real costs were the ball valve and the time taken to create the bamboo structure that holds it. The one variable cost is the bag of chlorine used to cleanse the water.

Ball Valve Chlorine Water Cleanser from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

A plastic waste recycling press

We’ve got a lot of plastic trash all over Africa, especially in the cities. A team from IDDS (Amit Gandhi from the US, and Mark Driordan from the UK) decided to create a way to add value to waste plastic by using a low-cost process to transform it into something useful: plastic sheets. From these sheets can be made a number of other products. On display they had shoes, bags, pencil cases and folders.

The sheets can be made from 3ply to 40ply in thickness, and the cost of assembly is minimal.

Turning waste plastic into plastic sheets from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

A pedal powered hacksaw for the disabled

Bernard Kiwia is from Arusha, Tanzania. He’s here at Maker Faire Africa as part of the IDDS group that has been building innovative devices for the last couple weeks in Kumasi, Ghana. Today he’s showing his device that he created from an old bicycle and some welded rods. It’s powered by someone sitting in a chair.

Pedal-Powered Hacksaw in Ghana from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

It cost Bernard about $45 to create the bicycle powered hacksaw and one day to fabricate.

Bernard’s been a bicycle mechanic for 3 years, and has been teaching students in Tanzania to fix them for the last couple. He was invited to IDDS and met a Guatemalan attendee that had some very interesting designs using bicycles. After seeing those, he realized that he could make similar tools and devices for the needs of people in Arusha.

(more pictures from Maker Faire Africa on Flickr)

Since that time, Bernard has created a windmill, cell phone charger, drill press and a pump – all working off of bicycle parts and mechanisms.

His bicycle powered water pump. It sits by the side of the road for kids to jump on and pedal:

A chair made from bicycle parts: