This summer, while interacting with villagers
in the Western African nation of Ghana, along with a team of faculty and
students from ASU, I was able to test one of the central tenets of Sarewitz’s
and Nelson’s commentary
published in Nature in December, 2008,
that a successful innovation (policy) rests upon the wisdom to know which
problem will cede to technological solutions and which ones will not. ASU’s engineering faculty and students,
involved with GlobalResolve,
had developed technological fixes to solve two perceived problems of smoke from
firewood cooking, and unreliable electricity in Ghana – they were stoves that operated
on smokeless gelled ethanol and “Twig Light” technology, respectively. We needed to find out which ones would be
embraced by villagers and which ones would not be, and why? We also needed to know if problems of villagers
as perceived by our engineers and students paralleled those of the villagers themselves. In short, were we developing technological
fixes for real village problems or for problems that we perceived to exist?
Last year, as part of ASU’s student
capstone project, facilities to produce ethanol, a smokeless fuel derived from
corn, had already been developed, shipped and installed in the village of
Domeabra. Engineering students from
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), a local university,
had declared this facility to be operational.
The next step was to come up with stove that would operate on ethanol that
would be gelled.
This spring, a group of male and
female engineering students designed stove prototypes that catered to a family
of five. The final product was a round, insulated,
approximately 20-inch-high single burner device with a fuel tray insert on the
side and a flat top. It was smokeless,
odorless, clean, and efficient. The
stove itself was significantly more efficient than a similar prototype that had
been developed in South Africa, and the gelled ethanol was about five times
cheaper than the ones being marketed in Accra, the capital of Ghana. However, ASU students would find out that their
stove had several design flaws considering families used round bottomed cooking
pots that required rigorous stirring while preparing their main meal and used
intermittent high heat. The cost of the
fuel, too, was high, because villagers used free firewood. Through a mapping exercise we conducted, we
found out that a typical home had anywhere from 10 to 21 family members, a far
cry from the small family that they had envisioned. Also smoke while cooking
was not considered a problem, rather a part of daily life.
The Twig Light prototype was a different story. A
simple lighting device built as a low cost alternate light source for poor villagers,
the Twig Light was made from a low cost thermoelectric generator using twigs to
light a bank of LED lights that was enough to light up a small room. When it was demonstrated for the first time,
villagers suggested using some burning embers/charcoals from the fireplace
instead of twigs and
voilá – the LED lights lit up bright enough to read a book
in a dark room. We told the villagers
the Twig Light generated 5 volts of electricity, and an immediate comment was –
could it also be modified to recharge cell phones?! It had become obvious to us that many
villagers that were with us had cell phones.
A lot of the homes in the villages
had electricity but it was unreliable and expensive. In some cases, electricity had been cut off
as villagers were unable to pay the steep monthly bills. So a notion of a lighting device that needed
no batteries, was low cost, easily accessible, and could generate electricity fascinated
villagers. When the demonstration was
over, determined groups of women requested passionately to be allowed to have
these devices immediately. When we reminded them that they were prototypes and
needed to be refined, they thought we were playing hard to get, and offered to
buy them on the spot! That it took a lot
of persuasion to make them back off is an understatement.
So what problems yielded to
technological fixes and what did not?
The reasons could potentially be
found in the fact that the Twig Light may work as this technology addresses
what Sarewitz and Nelson refer to as the [embodiment] of “cause-effect relationship connecting problem
to solution.” In other words, the low cost
and simple Twig Light solved a clear problem of high cost, unreliable,
centrally controlled electric service. Infrastructure
development that provides basic services in developing nations are notoriously
dysfunctional, but electricity that brings light in homes is clearly a felt
need that has met with success in improving people’s quality of life, while
allowing them to keep their values and interests, lifestyles and habits.
The gelled ethanol, on the other
hand, marketed to address the problem of deforestation and health issues were
indifferently dismissed by the villagers.
For them firewood was free and easily accessible from their farm plots. Smoke was part of daily cooking – they did
not perceive it as a health problem. Adopting the improved stoves would mean
changing their lifestyle, habits, values and interests. So they were not ready to fix a problem they felt
did not exist for them.
About the Author: Nalini Chhetri is a postdoctoral research associate
at CSPO, and a lecturer in ASU’s School of Letters and Sciences.
