Appropriate Technology (AT) Update 11-06-05
Paths of Native Africa
Monthly
Meeting
Sunday,
November 6, 2005, 4 p.m.
702 Moultrie St.,
San
Francisco
Report
by
Cliff
Thompson,
Appropriate Technology Evangelist, Paths of Native
Africa,
Webmaster, Friends of African Outlet
SIG
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Summary
An excerpt from the "Original Email Announcement" (whose topics list serves as a brief Table of Contents) for the AT Update, followed by an "AT Update Topic Reports" section that summarizes materials presented, is laid out below.
Original Email Announcement
From: friendsofafricanoutlet@yahoogroups.com on behalf of Cliff
Thompson [cliff@robots.org]
Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 8:39 AM
To: FriendsOfAfricanOutletNewsgroup
Subject: [friendsofafricanoutlet] Friends of African Outlet News 14
Appropriate Technology Update
Greetings Paths of Native Africa (PONA) & Friends Of African Outlet (FOAO) SIG…
I'll be delivering an Appropriate Technology (AT) Update report at the upcoming Paths of Native Africa monthly meeting. The presentation will include printed handouts & a showing of a short AT video, as well as something tasty from Berkeley's "Tropical Paradise" Ghanaian Restaurant. Topics will include:
Peace Corps, new resources & developments
Social Entrepreneurship (SE), a newly emerging "3rd Force" (in addition to Peace Corps & NGO's) solving problems in developing nation villages. As an example of SE in action, a brief documentary video clip will be shown of the Kenyan SE startup & their product, the "...ApproTEC Super-MoneyMaker, a one-person, leg-powered irrigation pump..."
Appropriate Technology, new developments. Profiled are the…
(1) "Desert Refrigerator", requiring no external energy supply, powered instead by a simple physics principle (Evaporative Cooling), developed by a Nigerian teacher, available now
(2) "Ice Maker", a freezer requiring no electricity, powered instead by an exotic physics principle, (Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube Effect), under development in San Francisco, slated for availability by 2006
(3) "Laptop Computer for Developing Nation Children", costing less that $100, made rugged & power-able by a built-in hand-crank generator & battery system, under development in Boston, slated for availability by early 2007
...
AT Update Topic Reports
Peace Corps, new resources & developments
Question: An NGO/Non-Profit (NGO/NP) in the United states may have project resources at the ready but no people in the destination country "on-the-ground" to act either as "trusted sources" to help receive/deliver goods &/or as Appropriate Technology (AT) skilled folk to help with the installation of AT supplies - are there ways/opportunities for the NGO/NP to liaison/partner with Peace Corps resources to help close the loop on the receiving end of an AT project in a destination country?
Answer: Received at the following Peace Corps events...
Peace Corps Cultural Festival: At the event, which included booths from a number of "Partner NGOs" with which the Peace Corps works, Peace Corps Regional Mngr. Jill Andrews stated NGO/NPs do team up with the Peace Corps, a common approach being to 1st establish an intermediary relationship with one of the Peace Corps Partner NGOs that also has projects in the same destination country; after having "your NGO talk to our NGO", if still further expertise is needed, the Partner NGO can assist by soliciting the Peace Corps in the area for the additional resources. A number of Partner NGOs are described in the Friends of African Outlet Peace Corps Cultural Festival Report, in the section "Partner NGOs"
Peace Corps "Find Local Events" > "California (93600+)" > "Mixer in Mountain View": At this event, which afforded an opportunity to meet & socialize with Peace Corps Volunteers like Dan Pudvay & Kate Lester, attendees...
Offered 2 additional NGO/Peace Corps liaison programs:
Peace Corps Volunteer "Friends of (Peace Corps Country)" programs such as "Friends of Nigeria"
Recommended further establishing good connections throughout the government hierarchy, as problems with missing shipments can arise upon arrival in the country &/or at the harbor docks, before ever reaching an initial trusted source. Fortunately, African Outlet Store Co-owner & PONA President Nigerian Trader Horgan Edet's father is a village/tribal Chief with a family well connected throughout the government - in a recent visit to the village, Horgan joined Nigeria's Minister of Education in an interview broadcast on Nigeria TV
Social Entrepreneurship (SE)
SE was recently profiled in a 4-part PBS documentary with web site called The New Heroes, which web site includes the report What is Social Entrepreneurship?, links to further Resources, & episode notes About the Series, for example Episode 2: Technology of Freedom, which contains a segment, shown at the AT Update presentation, on "...the founders of ApproTEC [renamed Kickstart]...who invented an economical water pump that gives Africa's subsistence farmers a chance to make a living...".
Appropriate Technology, new developments
Several new technologies were profiled including...
"Desert Refrigerator", Nigerian Teacher Mohammed Bah Abba's "pot-in-pot" cooling device
"Ice Maker", Engineers Without Borders volunteer Dave William's compressed air Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube Effect freezer device
"Laptop Computer for Developing Nation Children", MIT Media Lab's "One Laptop per Child" non-profit's $100 Laptop project
"Amazon Web Books Program" (late entry), Amazon's upcoming program to offer "users access to entire books online as long as they also buy the traditional, paper version"
"Where There Is No Doctor", is "considered the most accessible and widely used community health care manual in the world...", discovered at the Peace Corps Cultural Festival Partner NGO booth of the Herperian Foundation. Just before the AT Update presentation it was discovered that HealthWrights Publications maintains an online version of the book, thus available to villagers from any of the world's Cyber Cafés
[from "Updates" section below, more late entries]
LifeStraw, "...drinking straw... about $3...can save a life...make 185 gal. of water clean enough to drink…can prevent waterborne illnesses..." ["Time, November 21, 2005"]
Wrap-up
After the AT Update presentation, a tasty African meal was served, which featured a very savory Ground Nut Chop Soup from Berkeley Ghanaian Restaurant "Tropical Paradise", fallowed by a viewing of the Social Entrepreneurship PBS documentary The New Heroes, Episode 2 segment on the ApproTEC water pump. Among the various conversations that ensued it was intriguing to learn that...
African Outlet Store Co-owner & Paths of Native Africa (PONA) VP Judah Dwyer has been contacted for mutual event participation by Engineers Without Borders - USA (EWB-USA)
African Outlet Store Co-owner & PONA President Nigerian Trader Horgan Edet, & PONA Officer Tony Moses, both have Civil Engineering in their backgrounds. For PONA's Nigeria "Project: Horgan's Village 'Ibiaku Osuk'"...
Tony, after a recent visit to the village & discovery of the impressive purity & taste of the village's stream water (superior to locally available container water), is following through on plans for a village-run water bottling plant - he's currently filling out the set of EWB forms for assistance with the project
Horgan is readying a shipping container of school books for transport to
village representative & Chevron Texaco engineer Kufre Ekong Inyang,
which books were provided by the San Francisco Public Library by the
efforts of Librarian (& recent PONA officer), Judy Kopanic. Judy also
launched PONA's Mali "Project:
Water Pump" as a result of her periodic
visits to Mali to
teach French in Bandiagara Escarpment
Dogon village classrooms - it was during the
Mali project we became acquainted with the efforts, in a nearby village,
of the Mali Assistance Project
(MAP) & the contribution of EWB-USA Founder University of
Colorado Engineering Professor Bernard Amadei, to
Mali village water
projects as described in MAP's
January
2003 Report
Preserving Tribal Wisdom:
African Outlet Store Co-owner & PONA President Nigerian Trader Horgan
Edet, reflecting on the significance of the "pot-in-pot" cooler,
began
to recall similar village AT-based solutions that he witnessed while growing up
in Nigeria. He wondered how many other such inventions may exist as indigenous
technologies, some handed down from ancient times, & he mused, somewhat
ruefully, how much of this knowledge may actually be lost, from older
generations not having anyone to pass on their ancestral wisdom, to newer
generations not carrying forward same, as traditional village life is
increasingly abandoned for modern city life. One idea that may serve to save
this often hard won cultural knowledge would be to establish a "village
storytelling, tribal history" recording project. Recently, a precedent for such
a venture was set by electronics giant Hewlett-Packard and PBS television
station KQED, who teamed up to produce a "digital
storytelling... neighborhood history project" using a PDA in the form of an
HP IPaq Pocket PC (typically equipped with an audio recorder & camera), as
described on the HP Labs web site for
narrative
archaeology; such a venture could conceivably be conducted under the
auspices of HP's Global
Citizenship initiative "e-inclusion"
program.
In summary, some great new resources for developing nation villages have been found: The "Where There Is No Doctor (online edition)" spans the spectrum of Healthcare solutions & offers a compendium that is a perfect companion to the spectrum of AT solutions developed by the Peace Corps since its inception, as provided on CD by the software "Appropriate Technology Sourcebook" that drives the disks of the "AT Library". Joining these tools online are Peace Corps web site Peace Corps Volunteer Training Online materials (Index), as well as lists of Peace Corps Partner NGOs & Social Entrepreneur Resources
