Tool/Machine

Ruth Foster of TIWA, LLC in the U.S. will develop a finance application tool using money pictures to enable illiterate users to make accurate transactions. They will design and test a tablet with touch screen and build associated software for consumers that can be used to scan barcodes, or manually add products and prices. The final cost of the purchases will be automatically displayed using images of real money, which the consumer can then use to pay the correct amount.

Christine Yee with Darpan Bohara and Yashna Sureka of Smith College in the U.S. will develop a fingerprint scanner that can link to phone networks and banks to enable merchants to easily and quickly accept mobile money payments in India. Fingerprint identification is relatively secure and will simplify the payment process so people with different levels of literacy can use it.

Curtis Vanderpuije, Kodjo Hesse and team from expressPay Ghana Ltd. in Ghana will develop a low-cost, contactless device for merchants in developing countries to more easily accept and process mobile money transactions. They will design the device so it can read identifying information from merchants and customers using radio-frequency identification, and use unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) to communicate with existing mobile money providers.

Daniel Kamei of the University of California Los Angeles in the U.S. will develop a paper-based diagnostic that can rapidly concentrate and detect low concentrations of cervical cancer-specific biomarkers in self-collected vaginal swabs. Cervical cancer is a major health problem, particularly in regions with limited health care where there are no effective screening programs. The test will be evaluated on existing cervical samples that have already been analyzed for HPV and cancer using conventional methods.

Jodie Wu of Global Cycle Solutions in Tanzania will evaluate an affordable hand-powered multi-crop thresher to enable smallholder farmers to thresh a variety of crops in a fast and modular way. The thresher significantly increases productivity, works without electricity, and is portable, thereby reducing costs to the individual farmer. It is easy to manufacture from cheap and available parts, and is thus easy to maintain. A prototype, designed in collaboration with local farmers, has already been successfully tested.

Joseph Parse of Synovision Solutions in the U.S. will develop equipment to convert waste plastic shopping bags into drip irrigation tubing suitable for use by women smallholder farmers in developing countries. In arid regions where water is in short supply, carrying or pumping water for irrigation on smallholder farms is time- consuming and inefficient. These regions tend to also have lots of consumer waste, including plastic shopping bags.

Ton Rulkens and his team from Oxfam-Solidarité in Belgium will bring together women smallholder farmers, local blacksmiths, and scientists in a participatory approach to design labor-saving hoes for tilling and weeding in Northern Mozambique. Successful and widespread implementation of labor-saving tools has proven difficult to achieve partly due to a lack of consideration of local conditions. By taking into account women's preferences, accessibility constraints, social systems, and cultural beliefs, they will design improved hoe samples that should be more readily adopted.

Margaret Smith and colleagues at Iowa State University in the U.S. will evaluate a simple, portable, hand-operated seed cleaner using 320 women farmers in Uganda. Current practices are physically demanding, time consuming, and reduce the quality of the grain. They will refine the design of the seed cleaner using input from the target farmers to produce a second-generation device for local manufacturing. It will then be tested with several legume crops for durability, ease of transport, and affordability for groups of smallholder women farmers.

August Basson of the KEL Growing Nations Trust in Lesotho and collaborator Adriaan Jacobs will develop a time-saving seed planter adapted for use by small-scale women farmers planting maize and other grain crops. No-till planters reduce soil disturbance in order to promote conservation agriculture and improve productivity, but current models were designed for commercial use and down-scaled, making them inefficient and impractical for use by women. They will engineer an adapted rotary punch planter and distribute them for testing in the field.

Karime Séré of Intermon Oxfam of Spain, in collaboration with the National Research Institute for Technology and Science in Burkina Faso, will develop more efficient and durable rice husk furnaces and lower-cost rice sorting equipment to reduce the labor intensity of parboiled rice production, the principal livelihood activity of 18,000 Burkinabe women. Rice husk furnaces significantly reduce the time burden of collecting firewood by utilizing rice hulls as a readily available substitute fuel, and also reduce cooking time of rice by around half.