Tool/Machine

Setegn Gebeyehu of Oxfam America in the U.S. will work with Ethiopian women farmers, the private sector, and the Ethiopian Agricultural Extension System to develop and provide wooden groundnut shellers with substantial labor-saving and economic benefits. By involving all relevant parties in the design and testing process, they aim to develop low-cost, durable shellers that can be locally produced and maintained. This should promote widespread adoption, which has been a barrier to success for other labor-saving devices.

Alfred Alumai of Muni University in Uganda, along with Ronald Avutia and Yasin Angua of NilePro Trust, will evaluate the beneficial impacts of a small seeds planter for smallholder women farmers in Uganda. The tool facilitates row cultivation of millet, sorghum, and groundnuts, which saves time and labor associated with weeding and harvesting, and increases production and yield. It was developed with input from women smallholder farmers and has been successfully tested in a pilot study.

Vaibhav Tidke of the Institute of Chemical Technology in India will develop a mobile solar powered grain dryer to rapidly reduce the moisture content of grains, which extends storage life. Currently, women dry the harvested grains in the sun, which involves tilting and spreading at regular intervals for up to 45 days, taking up time that could be used for other farming tasks. Open sun drying also reduces quality and is less efficient, leading to significant loss of productivity. He has designed a wheel-loaded movable solar grain dryer that can reduce drying times to one day.

William Kisaalita of the University of Georgia in the U.S. will redesign a milk churner to make it suitable for women in order to reduce the time and labor needed to make ghee. In many sub-Saharan countries, the morning milk harvested from cattle can be sold in markets, but the milk harvested in the evening needs to be processed into longer-lasting products such as ghee to prevent it from perishing. The current method for churning milk to make ghee is time and labor intensive.

Donna Cohn and colleagues from Hampshire College in the U.S. will develop a cheap and simple threshing machine to more easily and carefully process pearl millet, which is a highly nutritious staple cereal grown in sub-Saharan Africa. To extract the edible grains, pearl millet is currently processed by hand, which is labor-intensive and highly inefficient, causing substantial reductions in yield. They will refine their thresher design, including producing variations for powering it, and field-test prototypes in Ghana for performance.

Tobias Oker and a team from the National Agricultural Research Organization in Uganda will develop a simple plucking tool to more efficiently remove the pods from groundnuts, which is currently done by hand and is labor-intensive and time-consuming for women. They will query farming communities on current harvesting methods to refine their design, and evaluate performance, labor cost, and perceptions in the field using prototypes compared to traditional methods. They will also train users and local manufacturers to fabricate the tools and encourage their use.

Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu of the Smallholders Foundation in Nigeria will improve his Box-in-a-Truck design for extending the lifespan of cassava, which is a major staple food grown by women smallholder farmers, to decrease labor costs associated with cassava processing. Cassava spoils within 24 hours of harvesting, and the traditional method of prolonging life by leaving the crops longer in the ground reduces the nutritional content. He has designed a small, manually transportable truck containing a wire box that is surrounded by moist sawdust and can hold 145 pieces of cassava.

Alexander Moseson of Drexel University and Tyler Valiquette of Catapult Design in the U.S. will optimize the design and promote the local implementation of planting and weeding tools that increase productivity and reduce labor of smallholder rice farmers in Asia. They will refine their design for easier manufacturing, and locally establish production and maintenance centers. They will also develop a local social entrepreneurship business plan to promote widespread adoption by farmers in South Asia, with a view to expanding to other regions and crops.

Derek Dunn-Rankin of the University of California, Irvine in the U.S. will refine the design of an energy storage device that collects and stores solar energy to enable indoor or evening cooking in developing countries. Traditional stoves use wood or animal dung as an energy source, which are labor-intensive methods, environmentally unfriendly, and potentially deleterious to health. The storage device consists of an insulated box containing potassium nitrite and sodium nitrite, which undergo a solid-to-liquid phase transition at a certain temperature.

Mateus Marrafon and colleagues from Instituto Kairós in Brazil will produce a new system for planting seeds using biodegradable strips of paper to increase productivity and decrease time and labor costs for smallholder farmers in Africa. The seeds are attached to the tape at regular intervals, which improves growth, and the tape physically protects them from pests and high temperatures. They will generate tape prototypes for both manual and animal sowing, and test their performance in the laboratory and in the field.