Water and Sanitation: Probably the Greatest Possible Benefit to Health that Exists

Great to read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) making it quite clear, if it wasn't clear enough already, that the cure for cholera is improving access to safe water and sanitation. The recent massive cholera epidemic in Haiti means that several years and billions of dollars of aid money have not resulted in the provision of safe water and sanitation. The epidemic in Zimbabwe means that provision of water and sanitation, which may have been adequate at one time, collapsed. (It is estimated that about half a million people were infected with some kind of diarrhea in Zimbabwe alone in 2012.)

The good news is that lots of diseases can be wrapped up along with cholera and eradicated; most water-borne diseases. The bad news is that no country has ever eradicated cholera or any other water-borne disease without providing clean water and sanitation. The mere development of a vaccine for cholera or any other single disease misses the point and misses a wonderful opportunity. Half a million cholera infections and thousands of deaths are reported every year, all for want of clean water and sanitation. But the true number of infections is likely to be several million and the number of deaths likely to be 100-200,000.

Institutions such as the Gates Foundation like to boast about how many billions they are putting into vaccines for individual diseases, such as rotavirus. That's admirable in its own way, but why line up a few diseases to be addressed and ignore the conditions that ensure these diseases will remain endemic for the foreseeable future? Especially considering how long lack of access to clean water and sanitation has been one of the most serious issues facing developing countries. If, as the NEJM article claims, the problem is related to rapid urbanization, we're a long time getting around to it; urbanization in many African countries began decades ago.

Access to clean water and sanitation for all may seem like a very long term goal. However, in conjunction with improved health services and education, better water and sanitation will also lead to better health and educational attainment indicators. Even maternal and child health, which are often said to be priorities, would be greatly improved. Rather than targeting various diseases and sectors of developing country populations, improved water and sanitation for all would result in benefits for all sectors. Indeed, progress in health and education provision will be a lot slower without improvements in water and sanitation provision.

In relation to the challenges of such an intervention, NEJM mentions expanded access to antiretroviral treatment to poor people in developing countries. But improved water and sanitation is not at all like antiretroviral treatment; everyone needs access to water and sanitation, not just pockets of people in certain parts of certain countries. Improved antiretroviral treatment does not aim to prevent HIV transmission, though big claims are now made about preventive benefits. Antiretroviral treatment is not like provision of water and sanitation because the former targets one disease, almost entirely ignoring other diseases, and even health, education and other development areas.

Indeed, the parallel is even weaker than that. Lack of access to water and sanitation affects all poor people, especially those living in rural areas and, arguably, affects women and children more, perhaps more directly, than adults and men. HIV is often more common among wealthier people with better education, and certainly among those who live in more urbanized areas. The article concludes that "the current state of development leaves more than a billion of the poorest and most marginalized people at risk of ingesting feces with their food and water". So let's not approach lack of water and sanitation as we did HIV and access to antiretroviral drugs. Access to clean water and sanitation is a basic human right, so why not approach it that way?

Ribbon of Hope Projects

It's a delicate balance sometimes, when you are trying to support orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and some other members of their family are even worse off than they are. Several of the guardians of the OVCs Ribbon of Hope Self Help Group are supporting face more immediate threats to their health than the children they are looking after. One mother is suffering from diabetes that appears to be very advanced. She is just recovering from TB and she has been losing her sight for some time. She is in her early twenties and is already having trouble caring for her daughter. If she was HIV positive, she could at least get antiretroviral drugs (ARV) for free. But as it's diabetes, the drugs are prohibitively expensive. Her own mother is on ARVs but she is old to be looking after a daughter and a granddaughter. The father of the child is absent.

Another HIV positive guardian is so sick that she has checked herself into a private hospital. Why she chose a private hospital when she can get the drugs for free is not clear. But she appears to be having trouble accepting that she is HIV positive and refuses to go to the local clinic, where she was diagnosed. You do hear stories of people preferring private hospitals but I doubt if this woman will benefit much from the care she gets there. And her life savings will not go too far, either. Maybe Ribbon of Hope can support one or two of her children but I think she has several others, who will all be vulnerable if anything happens to her. Her husband died some time ago, apparently of Aids.

Thankfully, some of the guardians are well enough to care for their own children, in addition to another child, usually a relative. They are all doing some kind of work but that usually involves long hours, low pay and a good chance that the employer will withhold the wages for as long as possible, months and even years. All the villages we are working in are sisal growing areas. These are vast tracts of land owned by a very small number of extremely rich business people and politicians. The villages are all isolated, several kilometers from the nearest tarred road. For people who live there, the main transport available is bicycle, motorbike, or hired bicycle or motorbike, for those who don't have their own.

We hope that each guardian will come up with some kind of income generation scheme, some way of making a bit of extra money. Ribbon of Hope will assist with loans, advice and perhaps other things. Some of the guardians already have a clear idea of what they would like to do and they have the skills and knowledge to start just as soon as the money is made available. Others are not so sure and are not quite ready. A couple of people seem unprepared to be completely honest or committed, but most had some kind of income generation activity up until the start of 2008. It's unbelievable how many people lost assets and businesses as a result of the civil unrest. Two and a half years later and many have not got back to where they were then and probably will not do so for some time yet. Some will be lucky just to get their land back but most have lost things they will never be compensated for.

After spending a few days visiting two of the villages where some of our clients live, we had to return to our fields, where the maize was in need of harvesting and the other crops, millet and sorghum, were in need of weeding. There has been terrible flooding in the last few months, since the maize was planted. Luckily, much of the maize has survived and the crop is looking good. The beans we planted between the maize plants were almost all washed away. The weeding is being done by some local people and in a few days we should have cleared the backlog and got back to the OVCs in the three other villages we work in.

I was very keen on demonstrating solar cookers and a couple of other simple technologies and I did some demonstrating a while back. But there has not been a lot of interest since. Ribbon of Hope has plenty of core activities to keep us busy and I wanted solar cookers and the like to be an additional activity that wouldn't take up too much time. I mentioned the ideas to the community volunteers whom we work with and they mobilized people. But after a few demonstrations, there were no requests for more. I'd like to do some refresher demonstrations but I'm not sure if it will be possible to drum up enough interest.

I think income generation schemes are good, especially when they work. But they often don't. Not everyone can be a business person. And as we have found from our own projects, mostly growing crops, there are a lot of things that can go wrong; too much rain, too little rain, diseases, pests, lack of market, poor infrastructure and downright dishonesty. That's why I try to persuade people to do some things that can save them money. If they spend a little less on cooking fuel, they will have more for food or other things. And you can save quite a lot, perhaps the equivalent of two or two and a half month's pay over a period of one year. I'd like to understand better why I have not been too successful in selling these technologies, which, by the way, are more or less free! It can be very hard to make money but it's not so hard to spend less.

But most of Ribbon of Hope's projects are going well at the moment. Some of the community based organizations are running themselves and we only visit now and again. One of the organizations that was doing badly at the start of the year, but turned itself around later, is now much stricter, which is a good thing. Too many times the work would be done by two or three people and the others would only turn up when the returns were coming in. A number of projects would have done well if the few workers just got on with it. But no one will work when they think others will help themselves to the results and many community based organizations fail because they are not strict enough about what people have to do in order to collect any of the group's winnings.

I think some people will do a very good job of supporting an extra child while continuing to look after their immediate family. Others may already be too overwhelmed by sickness and poverty. But then maybe we'll find additional ways of supporting them. So far, Ribbon of Hope has done very well keeping things ticking over. There have been challenges, some of which we have met, some of which have been too much. In the long run it's hard to say, but I'm optimistic about a lot of things. I'm just sorry I won't be able to stay here indefinitely to see how everything goes.

The Ups and Downs of April for Ribbon of Hope

It's nice to get to the end of another month and find that, despite all the problems and minor disasters, there are also things that are going well. Ribbon of Hope Self Help Group has quite a number of projects that are steady, and should produce good results soon. And there are other projects that are going just as we would like them to go. One project that didn't go so well was our acre of watermelons. Due to a combination of problems, we didn't sell a single one. Torrential rains and humid weather meant that they rotted and split just when we should have been harvesting them.

But on to the good projects. Some of the people we work with recently started a rabbit project and the rabbits have been doing what they are well known for. These same people have a chicken project which was a slow burner for some time but now is producing very good results. Near the watermelon field, on the Equator near Mogotio, we have an acre and a half of maize and beans and they are doing well, despite continuing heavy rains. And all is not lost in the watermelon field. We're only a third of the way into the one year lease, we'll grow more things there. And this is only a few of the projects that Ribbon of Hope is involved in. You can read the monthly report on their Facebook page.

I have been working with several community based organisations for some time now and I always worried about how they would keep managing to implement income generation activities that would really generate income. Sooner or later, if you keep starting chicken, goat and cow projects, there will be too many eggs and hens and new projects will undermine existing ones. Yet, chicken projects and growing maize and the like are good projects for several reasons. They are relatively cheap to start, the products sell well and they can be used by the producer or sold locally.

I started to look for other income generation activities and, although I compiled quite a list, I realized that there was another way to help achieve poverty reduction. There are various ways of cutting down on day to day household expenses and I have discussed them many times on this blog. The best examples are solar cookers and cooking baskets. These and other intermediate technologies can help people to reduce the amount of money they spend on cooking fuel considerably and use the money for something else.

These techniques have many advantages, including the fact that they cost little or nothing but can save quite a lot of money over a year, especially in a big family. Ribbon of Hope doesn't have a huge amount of funding and they would like to use what they have for projects that generate money. So projects that don't generate money, that save people money, are all the more welcome if they don't cost much. And income generation activities are well complemented by techniques for cutting everyday expenditure.

I have mentioned that two support groups we work with benefit greatly from having a very active and dedicated leader. But another support group had the opposite kind of leader, one who really undermined members of the group and, as a result, all their projects flatlined or failed. Recently, the members gave him the boot and elected a new and somewhat reluctant leader. But since then, the group has gone from strength to strength. I was ready to dismiss this group at one time. But luckily my colleague persevered and helped to turn everything around.

As for some groups, we never really had to worry about their leadership. In Mogotio, we have very fine group leaders who are constantly busy with community affairs. They are trained health volunteers and they spend so much time doing voluntary work, I still haven't figured out how they ever find time to make enough money to care for their own families. Yet they do care for their families and they each care for a local orphan as well. I'd really like to know how they do it.

It's a bit of a struggle for people sometimes because, even when things go well, they can end up with other problems. If you get a good maize crop, it's probably because the whole area is producing a surplus. But if conditions are bad, you are as likely to fail as everyone else. I'd like to see people diversify away from producing maize to the exclusion of almost everything else. Also, I'd like to see people concentrating on food crops until they have enough food and spare land to start growing cash crops. Too many lose everything because a cash crop gave good yields but had to be dumped because or a lack of market or something like that.

For me, the ideal crops are food, food that is eaten locally, food the grower can use themselves, food that can be stored, food that has a good, local market, and crops that are indigenous and therefore resilient when it comes to drought, flooding and all the other common adverse conditions you get here. Crops that require expensive inputs should be left to those who can afford them. Growing a crop that is secured against hazards is far better, to my mind, than one that could make you a very good profit, if it works. Sadly, watermelons fall into the latter category.

Visiting With SAIPEH

Although I am only in Mumias on a short visit, I brought a couple of solar cookers with me, along with some black pots. I was hoping I would be asked to demonstrate the impressive, but very simple, trick of cooking food without any costly fuel. Sure enough, I was taken to SAIPEH's feeding centre, where volunteers feed 100 or more children who are orphans, in some way vulnerable or disabled. They get through a lot of fuel every day and the cost over the course of a year is in the region of $1000. This is a very sizable sum to an organisation like SAIPEH. Any way of reducing it or eliminating it would be very welcome.

There were only a few people when I got there as it was far too early for lunch. But we set up the cookers to prepare some rice, just to demonstrate. We also set up a cooker to demonstrate how you can pasteurize milk or water to make them safe to drink. Solar cookers heat things up to 80 or 85 degrees, which is hot enough to cook and to kill all bacteria. In order to show that the water had reached the required temperature, we used a WAPI (Water Purification Indicator). This is a plastic cylinder with a lump of wax inside which melts at a little over 80 degrees. The wax is at the top of the cylinder when you start, but as it melts, it slides to the bottom.

Both the demonstrations worked well, despite a lot of thin cloud. The sun was hot even though the cloud didn't shift the whole morning. The rice cooked faster than I expected, in about one and a half hours and the water was ready in about 45 minutes. People were appropriately impressed. Every time I demonstrate, I keep thinking, what if it doesn't work. But it always does, as long as it doesn't cloud over. But in addition to being impressed, I would like to think that people would adopt the technology. They always say they will, but people who have been demonstrating for a long time say most people never adopt it. So we have to wait. Given that SAIPEH pay for the fuel, perhaps they will make sure that the fuel bill is cut, substantially.

We also had the opportunity today to demonstrate cooking baskets, at least, to some extent. There were lots of banana trees growing nearby and there were deep, round baskets available. We weren't organised enough to cook anything in one, they were too small, but I think the point got across. These can really save a lot of fuel and you can use them whether it's night or day, sunny or raining. They can be made of easy to find materials, such as straw, hay, newspaper, leaves, old clothes, etc, along with a bit of sacking material if you don't have baskets of the right size.

A technology we didn't have the opportunity to demonstrate yet, we just described it, is that of fuel briquettes made from organic waste, such as kitchen waste. They are made of various kinds of waste, finely chopped and mixed so they bind into a cohesive lump. These can be dried or compressed with a simple press made of wood or metal. We haven't got a press yet but we are still hoping to get one made as a template. Then they can easily be produced by 'jua khali' workers (jua khali meaning 'hot sun', they work outside).

If you combine these three technologies and put the required amount of work in, and that's not a lot of work, you can reduce your fuel bills to almost zero. Perhaps you can eliminate them but I suspect there will always be unforeseen occasions when you will need wood and charcoal. But even a few hundred dollars a year could mean better food for existing children or more food for more children. Now that the idea is there, hopefully there will be those who want to use these intermediate technologies. I'll be checking up on them now.

SAIPEH support several hundred children and teenagers and this brings up many problems that children have when they are orphaned, disabled or in some way vulnerable. A meeting revealed that some girls are still unable to go to school when they are having their monthly periods. I felt so bad when I heard that there was even a girl who reported using leaves because she didn't have access to any alternative. But it is unthinkable that even some of them are unable to go to school because of something like this.

Some community development workers in Kenya and other African countries teach girls to make re-usable sanitary pads out of flannel or other appropriate materials that can be recovered from old clothes. They are easy to make, especially for SAIPEH, as they have a training and resource centre that teaches tailoring. Making sanitary pads would be a great thing for prospective tailors to start off with. You can start and finish several of them in a few hours. A perfect lesson plan! Again, I hope there are people willing to adopt this simple alternative to commercial disposable sanitary pads. They are very expensive and ultimately unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.

No matter how good these intermediate technologies are and no matter how appropriate they are, the main challenge is getting people to adopt them. Just being impressed is not enough. You may think that anything would be better than using leaves instead of proper sanitary pads, but these technologies have been promoted elsewhere and they haven't always taken off. For me, it's all very well doing the research and giving people the plans and diagrams, but I'd really like to crack the nut of why people seem unwilling to adopt things that seem so obviously good and how I can meet this challenge. If and when the scales drop from my eyes, I'll report back.

Development is Not All About Money

It's basic science that if you insulate a hot cooking pot properly, the food inside will continue cooking even after you remove the heat source. But however basic, probably most people in the world cook with a continuous heat source, gas, electricity, parafin, wood, charcoal, whatever.

So it comes as a surprise to some people, people who would recognise the basic science, that you don't need to keep the food over a continuous heat source. You can bring things to the boil and then transfer them to a heat box, hay box, cooking basket, fireless cooker, whatever you want to call it. This insulated container will allow the food to continue cooking. Even if it's something slow to cook, like beans, it will eventually cook completely.

And when people don't even have ready access to the basic science, seeing food cook without any obvious heat source seems like magic. Of course, there is an obvious heat source, but when the food is removed and put in a stone cold container, it still cooks. Using this method you can save a lot of money on fuel. I don't think I need to rehearse the benefits of cutting fuel use or cutting costs of any kind.

The technology goes way back but interest in it seems to wax and wane. I've heard it was popular during and after the second world war, when there were shortages of food and fuel. And not only is the technology widely known and cheap, it can even be totally free to make one of these devices. Then it saves you money and you can use it to cook, keep things hot, even keep water hot all night so you can use it to wash with in the morning.

Here in Nakuru, working with Ribbon of Hope Self Help Group, I'm hoping that most people will be interested in making and using this neat trick. Most of them use charcoal or wood. These are expensive and trees are in short supply. It also requires a lot of work to search for fuel. Any way of cutting fuel use and costs would be welcome as most people in and around Nakuru are poor. And using cooking baskets even reduces smoke inhalation, water use and degradation of the nutritional value of the food because it cooks at low temperatures. And washing up is easier!

You can buy cooking baskets, marketed as fireless cookers, in the supermarkets. They are fine looking and work very well. But they are expensive. Not many people would shell out the equivalent of a whole week's salary, perhaps even two week's salary, for one of these. But the good news is that they are easy to make and they can be made using locally available materials.

On Friday we went to Athinai, a place totally dominated by sisal plantations and some factories that use the raw material for very basic products, such as ropes. The best of it is exported as a raw material, earning the company less than it should and earning locals even less. Especially considering the factory's habit of not bothering to pay people for months and even years.

Anyhow, the factory has some by-products, some of which are dumped, some of which are sold for good money and some of which are sold for very little money. The dry fibres, even the ones that are not fit to be sold, make perfect padding for cooking baskets. People in Athinai can get it in large supplies, free of charge. If they can't get enough, or if the factory starts to charge for it, they can use rolled up newspapers, dry banana leaves, hay, straw or anything dry and light that is a good insulator.

Instead of weaving expensive baskets and using other materials that go into the beautiful cooking baskets you see in supermarkets, I got a couple of used sacks in the market, one small and one large. People can get sacks free of charge if they know where to look or who to ask. Then all they have to do is stuff the large bag, make a little nest for the samll bag, which will hold the pot. A piece of material of some kind, stuffed with the stuffing and tied off or sewn, will do as the lid. Then tie off the big sack to make it all snug and you're cooking.

In front of the people who turned up for the demonstration, we stuffed a pile of sisal waste, something people there are so familiar with, into the sack as described. A pot of rice was brought to the boil and transferred to the cooking basket. And 40 minutes later people were shown the cooked rice. Not only were they astounded, but they were invited to take the whole thing apart so they could be sure there was no trick involved, which they did.

Cooking just for myself, I spend about ten shillings a day on charcoal but people with families can easily spend twice or three times that amount. It is estimated that you can cut charcoal (or wood) use by half by employing a cooking basket. So the amount saved is considerable. If someone earns 150 shillings a day working in the fields and they spend 600 shillings a month on charcoal, it's like getting an extra two day's wages without having to do the work. 24 extra days a year!

Rather than just concentrating on income generating activities, Ribbon of Hope is also looking at ways of cutting expenditure. These cooking baskets are perfect because they need not cost anything and they start saving you money straight away. Coupled with solar cookers, the amount of money people could save throughout the year begins to look like an excellent bonus. If you only use the solar cooker on 100 days of the year, that's another 6 day's wages to add to make a cool extra one and a half months. And as we don't have to give people this estimated 4,500 shillings a year, we think it's a pretty sustainable way of helping people with their finances.

Solar Cookers: Free or Just Cheap?

I want to find community development projects that either make money or reduce costs that are themselves free or almost free. I've started with a simple solar cooker, made by Solar Cookers International (SCI), in Nairobi. But they cost 500 Kenyan shillings (around £4.50), which would also buy you about 12 kilos of the staple food, ground maize meal. That's food for quite a few people, and I wouldn't blame people for saying 'it's a great idea but I can't afford it now'. Especially when you can buy a charcoal burning stove for about 150 shillings.

Of course, charcoal is a significant expense and people with families can use 15 or more shillings a day worth of it. True, you could point out how much less charcoal you would use if you invested in a solar cooker. But the word 'invest' is the big problem. Many people wouldn't have the amount of money they need to invest all at once. And even if they had the money, they still might use it for something else, such as a solar powered light or a battery powered torch. People use their money as they see fit and make their spending decisions based on their own criteria.

I love SCI's cookers, I use them myself. I have the luxury of being able to afford several, which is ideal on a sunny day. They are also great for demonstrating the concept because they fold up and I can easily carry three or four, along with the other paraphernalia needed to show people how to use them. They are resilient and so simple, I'd recommend them to anyone. They are cheap, but not free.

However, when the money available is a hundred or two hundred shillings a day, perhaps less, these cookers are not going to fly off the shelves. I have tried suggesting to people that they could make their own, given that they are simple and require cheap materials. I've said I would come and help them to make cookers so they would have them for a maximum of about 50 shillings. This has been met with some enthusiasm, but not much. I'm not terribly sure why this is, but I'll be looking out for the explanation.

Anyhow, when you demonstrate the use of solar cookers, people are excited, inspired, even stunned. They start off by dismissing the possibility of cooking with a piece of shiny cardboard, regardless of whether you paint the pots black or any other colour. But when they see their everyday foods cooked they are speechless. Even ugali, the tasteless and almost nutrition-free (it's pure starch) staple, boiled maize meal, cooks far more easily than it does on a charcoal stove. At least some people are interested. But there's still the problem of cost.

So after demonstrating their use in Salgaa, half an hour West of Nakuru, I said I'd come back and help people to make them. They make all sorts of things themselves, so cutting out a shape in cardboard and sticking on shiny paper shouldn't be a problem. The cardboard can come from large boxes and the shiny paper could be aluminium foil. These are cheap. Compared to the manufactured solar cooker, it's really cheap, almost free. But that doesn't impress people. They have to pay for cardboard boxes, they are very useful. And aluminium foil is not cheap enough for some people, though the amount you'd need for a solar cooker is small.

Well, it's possible to get large amounts of cardboard very cheaply, perhaps free, if you look in the right places. And it's possible to get very good reflective paper, very durable, much better than aluminium foil. I wandered the streets looking for products that use this material and discovered that new vehicle wheels are wrapped in this untearable material, which is almost shiny enough to see your face in. Also, supermarket products, such as chocolate, sweets, tea and various other things are wrapped in similar materials.

I knew I would be met with more objections, we don't have a car, we don't eat chocolate, etc. But neither do I have a car nor do I eat most of these products. The thing is, someone does. They are not stacked in the supermarkets for no reason. And when people have finished with things, they throw them away. Over the fence, in a ditch, anywhere. Occasionally, they throw things in a bin and they end up in a dump. But still, this means that this great reflective material is available, you just have to look.

I looked and enquired and asked whoever I could think of. I was met with complete incomprehension when I said I didn't want to buy vehicle tires. But when it was realised that I placed a value on the material they were wrapped in, availability suddenly dropped. It was clear that I would have to pay money if I wanted this stuff, being white, and therefore incalculably rich. But the people who were going to make the solar cookers, they wouldn't have to pay money. Not much, anyhow. And people here are good at finding things they need or getting them very cheaply. So I left it up to them to collect the materials.

This hasn't worked so well. On the appointed day, I turned up to find 40 people, 2 cardboard boxes, one too small to be of much use, and three wrappers, around half a square meter of reflective material altogether. But I had brought glue and glue brushes and most of the materials were there to make a start. I said what had to be done and sat down and told people to go ahead. Eventually one person volunteered and a few others joined in. They couldn't complete the cooker, but I think it was clear to everyone there how easy it is to make the cooker. I'm just hoping that they will also see that they have to collect the materials needed, because I can't do that.

Of course, for less than £200 I could buy every person there a solar cooker. For about £50, I could supply them with all the materials to make their own. But how sustainable is that, for a start? And how many people would use the solar cooker if I presented them with it for free? This would not be sustainable, not at all. And I have given people with plenty of education and free time presents of solar cookers. Not one of them has used it. I know solar cooking is a hard sell, in terms of people actually using the technology. And I also know that you can't just thrust it on people.

It's going to take more time. There are community leaders in Salgaa who are very keen. Slowly, we will push the issue and hope that even a handful of people will start to find some way of including the solar cooker in their day to day lives. Who knows what the result will be. Solar cookers are not the only example of free or almost free community development projects, but this is the first time that I have tried one of them with the aim of establishing 'free or almost free' as a development model (or micro model). It's early days and I'll report back in due course.

Experimenting with Diversity

It's odd how the weather can go from very dry to very wet quite unexpectedly. During the wet season, there was sometimes too much rain all at once, which threatened to wash away crops which were about to be harvested. Rain delayed the harvest of beans, which also resulted in some losses. Then the dry season started, so after harvesting, we returned to the practice of irrigating the other crops that were planted to overlap with the harvesting, a field of watermelon. And then the dry season was interrupted by a week of torrential rain, which threatens the watermelon, due to be harvested in Late March.

With any luck, the dry weather will return and what is left of the watermelon crop, hopefully most of it, will do well. But the field is waterlogged and some of the smaller fruit and plants have been overwhelmed by the thick mud that has been stirred up. All we can do is make sure water is not collecting anywhere and that any plants and fruits that can be saved are saved. Things have been looking brighter and drier for the last two days.

And with the brighter, sunnier weather, we at Ribbon of Hope have been able to return to demonstrating solar cookers. We had a good day at Mogotio, North of Nakuru, last week before the heavy rains started. Over thirty people came to see the demonstration and the debate about whether it was or wasn't possible to cook with 'a piece of silver cardboard and a saucepan painted black' was noisy. Scepticism turned to interest as we checked the food's progress about one hour in; interest turned to amazement when we invited people to test out the result half an hour later.

Today, we went to a town called Salgaa, also North of Nakuru. Closer to 40 people turned up and asked many questions as the rice and ugali (boiled maize meal, the staple food) and sukuma wiki (kale) cooked in the hot sun. In fact, giving a lot of time to answering questions was good because many people cook things one way and one way only. Today, they saw their beloved staple food cooked without using boiling water and without stirring. The whole thing can be put on to cook while the chef attends to other things. And that's just one of the many advantages of cooking this way!

Our aim is to increase self reliance through a variety of income generation schemes and ways of reducing day to day costs. So next week, we hope to return to Salgaa and show people how to make a solar cooker. Buying one is good, because people can save a lot of money and learn a great technique. But if they could make a solar cooker themselves, they could save even more money and they would always be able to make another when the original one wears out. Someone today was asking me if it was really sustainable to sell people a solar cooker for 500 Kenyan shillings (about 4 UK pounds). Well, it is a lot more sustainable than using charcoal or wood. But being able to make these cookers, and it's not difficult, would really put the icing on the cake.

On the opposite end of the scale in terms of self reliance, there is a big problem with the country's dependence on maize for almost all their food needs. It is not an indigenous crop and, for various reasons, it is becoming less productive. Because the weather has been so unpredictable lately, it would be far better to grow more resistant crops such as millet, sorghum, amaranth and many others. These do better in challenging conditions, like drought and flooding. But they also tolerate poorer soil and require less fertilizer and pesticides, substantially reducing the costs that farmers face.

Many farmers remain too dependent on a government that has never actually done very much for them. The scandal of the subsidized maize scheme, which allowed well connected people to make money out of 'relief' food supplies while the costs to ordinary people continued to rise and around a quarter of the country faced serious shortages, was less than a year ago. But the failure of farmers to produce enough food is partly their own fault. Some try to produce cash crops that end up making money for someone or some industry, but don't make much for individual farmers. Others, most farmers in fact, rely on rain fed agriculture, rather than employing some relatively simple method to harvest rainwater.

Small farmers are, of course, in need of ready cash, no less than non-farmers. But there are also those who produce far too little food for their own family and yet also make too little from cash crops to purchase additional food. There should be enough land in Kenya for the country to be food secure, regardless of how weather patterns are changing. True, the government should do a lot more, but perhaps people shouldn't wait for their politicians to do things that it has never done before. Hence the need for anything that increases self reliance.

Sadly, I am not an experienced farmer, I have to go around asking people for advice on what to plant and how to deal with problems that arise. But I feel that the very practice of experimenting with diversity is a good thing in itself. Equally, I think people need to experiment with cooking and eating different things and cooking them in different ways. I can't claim to have many converts yet but this kind of experimenting can be done without spending very much money. And development at low cost is, I think, well worth striving for, especially given the relative lack of success with development at high cost.

Income Generation Activities Galore

Just over a year ago I appealed to people I know, especially on Facebook, to help me to identify possible income generation activities suitable for developing countries where little capital, skills or infrastructure are available. I was overwhelmed by the slightly fewer than two responses I received and the first one didn't fly. So I set about researching on the internet, contacting people and talking to anyone who was prepared to discuss the subject. Now that I have started making a list, I decided to post it here on my blog so that others trying to research the same thing won't have to start right at the beginning. And maybe some people will even contribute to the list!

The list is by no means exhaustive and the categories are just based on the way things look from here. They overlap to some extent and they are in no particular order, though I think the first two are particularly important because local acceptability can make or break an income generation activity, no matter how 'good' it may seem. And some of the activities that are already widely carried out have a lot to recommend them. The community based organisation I work with, Ribbon of Hope, already grow a number of crops and have financed several livestock programmes. But it's time to branch out, try new things, diversify and ensure that people get the maximum benefit possible.

The approach we are likely to take is to ask our clients what gaps they feel there are in their local market, what local materials are available or could be made available. Also, what skills are there, what do people already know how to do. There must be local products that we don't know about and sometimes it turns out that people can make or do things but just hadn't realised the value of that skill. I'm not sure in advance what we will gain from this or how we are going to elicit the sort of information we want, but I think it could be a valuable exercise. Rather than just teaching people a skill or a few skills, we would also like them to be able to assess all the opportunities that exist and consider acquiring as many skills as possible. So that's the first category.

The second category is to get people to help us make an inventory of what could be produced in the area and sold in a local market or business. I'm thinking of things like sunflower or sesame oil, peanut butter, jam from seasonal fruits, honey, butter, cheese or anything else, even things that are already produced but for which there is little or no market, yet. I'm thinking of a campsite I stayed at in Tanzania which sourced things like this in a relatively remote area. The result was spectacular because many of these products here are only available in highly processed, branded forms (which taste disgusting). They should be produced locally if at all possible.

Ribbon of Hope already supports several shambas (smallholdings), which I have mentioned several times on this blog. Those smallholdings should produce everyday foods that people in the area need but they could also produce high value crops, such as sesame and sunflower seed, where clients can also produce the sesame or sunflower oil. These have the advantage of yielding highly nutritious oil cake as a by-product, which makes excellent animal feed. We should produce animal fodder, especially fodder that can be stored for use during dry periods, which are all too regular and protracted here. And there are all sorts of interesting crops we could consider growing, just to keep things diverse.

Dairy cattle, goats and chickens are a well tried income generation scheme and they are usually successful. Because they are such a good bet, they can require a fair amount of capital, which some of the more risky and less well tried schemes don't. But not everyone can afford to take risks. I'd say, get the low risk schemes started first and then add the others in at leisure. We mustn't forget the hides and furs of stock such as cattle, goats and sheep, either. Certainly, there are many uses for sheep wool, regardless of the quality. But another type of livestock that you don't see so much around here is rabbits, especially the very big ones that are bred for meat. There must be many uses for their fur, too.

There are good opportunities for different types of food processing here, especially food drying. Fruit and vegetables can be solar dried at very low cost. Many crops, such as mango, pineapple, banana and tomato flood the market at certain times of the year and a lot is dumped. These are all good when dried. Ribbon of Hope produced a beautiful crop of coriander in the last few weeks and this would be as good dried as fresh, except that it would be a far more viable crop if we could dry large amounts of it. Mushrooms are grown locally and are a potentially lucrative and nutritious crop that is also good dried. Yoghurt is already widely produced, cheese isn't so popular and maybe there's a reason for that. But many things could be made with local ingredients, such as biscuits, cakes, bread, cassava chips and the like.

Some of the areas here are blighted with a monoculture, especially sisal. But I'm sure people could be persuaded to make things of higher value rather than rope, which is how most of the local sisal ends up. We'll see what people who have been surrounded with sisal all their lives come up with. Not too far from here, silk worms are farmed, so that's another possibility. I've mentioned before the possibility of producing reusable sanitary pads. There are probably going to be lots of objections but many people, especially young girls, can't afford disposable ones so it's worth some effort. Leather goods may be another possibility, especially if local people are successfully breeding relevant livestock. No doubt there are other artisanal products, such as pottery, candles and whatever else. Sorry for being vague but the gaps will be filled in eventually.

Ribbon of Hope has already funded a successful project selling water and this raised surprisingly large amounts of money. Another possibility would be to pasteurize water using solar cookers or solar heaters and selling it. Included in this category, not many people in this dry province of Rift Valley use irrigation, nor do many people harvest rainwater. This is short-sighted and even journalists are apt to bemoan the fact that there is an unwise dependency on rain fed agriculture throughout Kenya (if journalists notice, it’s probably been a problem for decades). It's time to change this, even if it's only to a small extent. Equally, many people don't irrigate their land, even when there is a source of water close by. Since Ribbon of Hope started irrigating its fields, neighbouring farmers have started borrowing their pump. So it is catching on!

One of my favourite types of income generation activity or cost saving activity relates to fuel or energy. I have mentioned solar cookers, such as simple reflective boxes or more complicated parabolic cookers. These are great for cooking food, drying food and for pasteurizing water or milk. Some of our projects involve milk production so free pasteurization would help reduce costs a lot. I've also mentioned fuel briquettes made from waste of various kinds. People could produce these for their own household but they could also produce them for sale in the local area. Wood and charcoal, the most common cooking fuels, are expensive and likely to go up in price. Solar is cheaper, cleaner and better for the environment and could be used to supplement other sources of fuel. Biogas is more difficult to produce but we are hoping to get some to train us in how to produce the stuff.

Some trees and shrubs could be a useful addition to any shamba. The Kenyan government is thinking of introducing a law about people growing a certain number of trees per acre. True to form, they are not giving any advice as to what trees should be grown and which should be avoided (there are some serious problems that result from choosing the wrong trees). And people with very small, possibly rented shambas, will not want to risk reducing their yield by sticking something unproductive in their fields. But there are productive trees and ones that are good for the soil. There are some that produce fruit without compromising the field crops and others that produce oils and even animal fodder. There are trees that can benefit in various ways, so these should be carefully selected.

Finally, some organisations end up with assets that they only sometimes use, such as equipment and tools. These could be rented out to neighbouring farmers or swapped for other benefits, such as labour or tools that are lacking. Tools and machinery are prohibitively expensive here, which is why so many farmers try to fly by the seat of their pants and sometimes fail. Even rainwater harvesting and irrigation involve costs that small farmers can't always meet. But they might be able to share, for a fee, of course. Ribbon of Hope's neighbours have increased their yields so much in the last few months by using their petrol pump that they could easily afford to pay a small fee.

Well, that's it for the moment, but that's quite a list. I'll continue researching and noting progress (and problems) and I'll add links to further information when I can get around to it. I hope people find this list useful and if anyone has other ideas for income generation activities, please let me know. Thank you in anticipation!

Self Reliance Doesn’t Protect Against Unreliable Leaders

We have built a bigger parabolic cooker and are now waiting for a suitably sunny day to try it out. Some areas around here get sun all the time but the parabolic cooker is not very mobile. So we just have to wait for suitable conditions. Meantime, one of the things we are concerned about is safety. For a start, the concentrated light reflected from the device is very hard on the eyes and could potentially damage users' eyesight. We can use sunglasses but there's no guarantee that others will do the same, especially as some of the people around will not even be using the device but could still be affected.

There is also the issue of safety from burns. Parabolics heat things to very high temperatures. Some of the models I've found online depict a cooking pot at about chest height. If this pot were to be turned over by accident, the user could receive dangerous burns. I would prefer a model where the pot is low and where you can move the parabola without moving the pot and vice versa. This should reduce the possible dangers. We discussed this problem with other people experimenting with parabolic cookers and they agreed. We resolved to suspend the pot from a line or large tripod, rather than trying to build a tripod inside the parabola.

One of the community support groups is so interested in solar cooking that they have asked for a workshop on making the cookers. We will be doing that in the next few weeks, once we have all the materials. The members of the support groups themselves need to bring the materials because there is very little funding available. But it is a good exercise to get them to source the materials as most of them should be cheap or even free. One of the advantages of solar cooking is increased sustainability and self reliance. Therefore, recycled materials are preferable to new materials. I suspect people here will be good at finding cheap and free materials!

The same people who have shown such interest in solar cookers also raised questions about home made, reusable sanitary pads. A friend kindly sent me some materials on how to make these. I also found various websites dedicated to this issue. Sanitary pads are so expensive here, compared to people's ability to buy them, that it is no wonder many never use them. This is a particular problem for young girls as they have no spending power at all. They often miss school for a few days every month, which is quite unnecessary. However, there are safety aspects relating to making reusable sanitary pads as well and I hope we can include resolutions to this problem as part of the project.

We're still trying to find out about getting people to produce briquettes from organic waste as a way of reducing use of wood and charcoal, which is expensive and in short supply. It's also time consuming to collect wood and make charcoal. We have plenty of instructions for the process but lack the devices that could mix the materials and compress the mixture into a suitably compact end product. We are in touch with people at Egerton University who may be able to help us. Ultimately, the process should be cheap and small scale, but as someone near here has already done some work on this area, we'd like to see that first.

We visited the local municipal dump to see what useful materials may be available there. Actually, there are many people in the dump, every day, picking up all the materials they can sell on for reuse. I think we need to spend more time finding out what reaches the dump, who is picking it up and selling it on, what materials never reaches the dump and what other recycling projects are currently taking place. There are lots of organisations here doing various things and few organisations seem to be aware of what others are doing. As we are trying to find tried and tested ways of reducing poverty and increasing self reliance, we need to know what others are doing in and around Nakuru. That is proving to be a difficult task!

There's a lot of talk about closing down the camps for internally displaced persons (IDP) which were set up as a result of the post election violence. It's all very well to get people to go back home but many don't wish to return to properties from which they were forcibly ejected. Many of the properties have been burned, looted and squatted by others. The government is giving many mixed messages about how much they will pay people to return home and what they will do for people who can't go back to where they were before. Also, the IDP camp in Nakuru consists of many small plots, all of which have been purchased by the residents. People have been there for nearly two years, they have made lives for themselves. They have set up kitchen gardens, shops, community groups and what not. The 'camp' is now a village in its own right and the current government plans seem like yet another forced eviction.

The support group that we are involved in at the IDP camp is interested in some of our projects and this area is in particular need of greater sustainability and self reliance. But people there are now wary of doing anything in an area that they may have to leave in the near future. There is even talk now about the next election and the possible displacement that may occur in the next few years. Far from trying to anticipate and prevent further politically motivated violence, politicians seem to be spending their time and energy planning their attack.

Empty Pockets Revisited

It's nice to be able to try out some of the things I've been looking for, thinking about and researching for a long time. Not my ideas, by the way, just ideas that sound like good income generation activities and ways of saving money. Generally, they are cheap or free sustainable activities that are easy to get involved in, even for those who have few practical skills, such as myself. I'm harking back to a posting entitled 'Empty Pocket Finances', which I wrote nearly a year ago.

The sort of projects I am thinking of have not changed that much. At present we are trying out solar cookers and cooking baskets but we would like to look into reusable, home-made sanitary towels, briquettes made from organic waste, solar fruit and vegetable driers and, I'm sure, many other techniques. Anything that people can fit into their day to day life with the minimum bother and the maximum benefit.

In addition to persuading people to use solar cookers, cooking baskets, home-made sanitary towels and other things, we would like to get people to make these cookers, baskets and towels themselves. Perhaps they'll even go on to teach other people and convert them to the virtues of sustainability and self-reliance. Then it will be up to them to sell the ideas on to others. So, in addition to saving people money, some people should be able to go on to make money. Admittedly, just a little money, but some of our clients are making almost nothing right now.

So much for the theory, anyhow. But we visited a Ministry of Agriculture office that has been involved in developing appropriate technology for several decades, apparently. One of the people we talked to had little good news to impart. He said he had long been trying to persuade people to do things that would be of benefit to them, with very little success. On the other hand, his colleague seemed to be of the opinion that people find change hard but that that's no reason not to continue to develop good ideas and try to disseminate them.

We also visited Egerton University to see a parabolic style solar cooker being constructed using an umbrella, much like the one I made recently, only bigger. I want to try a bigger one now to see if they can do some things that the Cookit can't do. I'm pretty sure they can but I am worried about safety aspects as people here are not exactly safety conscious. For instance, parabolic reflectors can quickly damage your sight. And if they heat things up to high temperatures, they are potentially dangerous when it comes to spillages, especially when children are involved.

But maybe this won't be a problem. When we were at Egerton, we were able to make some design suggestions that should make the parabolic cooker a lot safer. As for the difficulty of getting people to adopt new things, we hope that living close to our clients will mean we can check up on and badger them regularly. And if they tell us they are short of money or that they need something, we can ask them why they haven't adopted the wonderful techniques that various people around the world have made available, free of charge.

What Has Solar Cooking Got to do with HIV Prevention?

Another day courting the sunshine. I decided to try to cook githeri, a mixture of maize and beans. But it takes a very long time and after four hours of demonstrating and discussing solar cooking, I took the mixture home to finish cooking it on a jiko (charcoal cooker). However, the rice and vegetables were evidence enough to convince the group of about 15 people. So we'll get together again next week and discuss the issue further. The following week, we'll have a workshop to make our own solar cookers. The week after, who knows...

This blog started off concentrating on HIV and it may seem that I have wandered off the point. But let me recap a bit. Throughout, I have argued that HIV transmission is related to many of the everyday aspects of people's lives, such as their environments, their employment status and work conditions, their levels of income and education, their health, nutrition, sanitation, infrastructure and many other things.

Solar cooking, solar water pasteurization and renewable energy sources in general have the attraction of addressing many of these issues. Using renewable energy means that people use less wood, which is great news for the environment. They produce less smoke and greenhouse gases, which reduces sicknesses related to smoke inhalation. Acute respiratory infections (ARI) represent one of the biggest threats to people's health and life expectancy. ARIs combined with diarrheal conditions account for around 40% of deaths in infants and under fives.

Paying for fuel is a major day to day cost that can be cut by using something like solar energy, which is very plentiful in African countries. Much time and energy is spent on collecting and preparing fuel for cooking, time that could be better spent doing other things. And there are few better ways for people to increase their self reliance than to explore renewable and sustainable resources.

Food cooked on solar cookers cooks slowly and is therefore more nutritious. It also uses less water, something that is in short supply and that can take a lot of time and effort to collect. In fact, the job of collecting fuel and water often falls to women and children, especially girls. Many's the time children don't do their homework because they spend the remaining daylight hours after school doing household chores.

At the moment, we are concentrating on telling people about solar cookers, why they could make their lives easier and better, how it could help them save money, etc. But in the longer term we are looking for income generating activities (IGA). For example, it's possible to make items to sell, such as cakes, roasted peanuts, ugali (boiled maize meal) and other popular foods, commonly sold on the street. Saving on fuel costs could give people the edge over their competitors. Perhaps people could also make and sell solar devices such as cookers and cooking baskets.

Well, that's why we're experimenting with solar cookers and those are some of the reasons we feel they are relevant to HIV and HIV prevention.

Donor Funding: Pseudo Worries About Pseudo Aid?

The parabolic solar cooker, made from an umbrella lined with tinfoil, works well when it comes to heating up water. I'll try cooking with it when I have found a suitable pot with handles and painted it black. Meantime, I wish to demonstrate the 'Cookits' that I bought from Solar Cookers International to an audience that could turn out to be as many as 20 people, far from ideal. I'd prefer very small groups of people but I've agreed to it.

As I am trying to win people over to solar cooking, I'm concentrating on things that people here like to eat. Thankfully, that's quite a small range of fairly basic foods. Tomorrow I hope to cook githeri, a mixture of beans and maize. It will take some time to cook so I'm hoping for 4 or 5 hours of uninterrupted sunshine. I'll have to cook something else that doesn't take so long or my credibility could be open to question.

Actually, the credibility of some Westerner lecturing people in a developing country about renewable energy and sustainable cooking techniques is pretty questionable as it is. Someone recently claimed in an email to me that people in the US have shown great interest in his solar cooker. It's a pity they couldn't show a bit more interest in reducing energy and resource consumption on a national level. And if every American family purchases one of those particular solar cookers, the amount of plastic needed to manufacture them will be phenomenal.

When people ask me if we all use solar cookers in Ireland, I tell them there is not enough sun. This is true, but does everyone there use wind, wave or tidal power? I don't think so. Come to think of it, one of the more dubious gems of wisdom sent from rich countries to poor countries recently is biofuels. In addition to using up scarce land, water and other resources, people here are very unlikely to make much money from such activities. They need food, not biofuels and they need to grow food for themselves, not accept handouts in return for biofuels. Enough land in developing countries has already been destroyed in order to produce cheap raw materials for rich countries.

Questions are now being raised about jatropha production, a biofuel crop that is said to grow in marginal land. Well, they say that about all biofuel crop production. Unsurprisingly, people at the Nairobi Trade Fair last week were promoting jatropha even for farmers with as little as one acre to spare for cash crops. Perhaps just about anything being hawked as good for small farmers by rich countries should be viewed with great suspicion. We in developed countries don't have a great reputation for telling the truth.

Questions are also constantly being raised about the effectiveness of aid, especially now that so many wealthy countries are feeling the pinch from the current financial crisis. Personally, I'm not against all aid or all aid agencies. However, much of the money that is called foreign aid is spent on furthering the economic, strategic and political interests of wealthy countries and corporations. The most important questions should be about how much 'aid' money even leaves the donor country and what (and whom) the money that does leave is being spent on. The idea that developed countries bestow lots of goodies on developing countries and get nothing in return is pure bullshit, but sadly not the biodigestible kind.

Nairobi Trade Fair and Solar Gadgets

A colleague and I went to the Nairobi Trade Fair yesterday. Many of the exhibits were the standard agricultural and small industrial production, crops, animals, goods such as rope and honey and the like. There were impressive fields of sunflowers, bananas and cabbage and well fattened cows, ostriches and sheep. And there was agricultural machinery aplenty for ploughing, preparing, irrigating, reaping and threshing.

But much of what I saw looked like it was aimed at rich or relatively rich farmers. The majority of farmers in Kenya are subsistence farmers with small amounts of land. They often aim to provide their household with some food and perhaps some surplus to sell. But they would not be able to afford the high grade machinery that was on offer. Even the machinery that was specifically aimed at 'small' farmers was very expensive. We were told that it was cost effective to grow an acre of jatropha for its oil seed crop, used for biofuels. But the machinery to press the oil would put most farmers off. And no farmer with only one acre would give it over to a cash crop.

Of course, farmers would be well advised to steer clear of biofuels anyhow. Their price are predicated on large scale production, which is, by definition, beyond the reach of small farmers. And producing energy products for Western countries is unlikely to make anyone in Kenya very rich, unless they are very rich already.

But farmers have been hoodwinked many times in the past to produce cash crops, such as sugar, tea, sisal and coffee. Small farmers have the most to lose when they find that it is not as productive as they were told. Some are giving up on these cash crops to find an alternative or even to grow food crops that they can use and sell the surplus of. But sadly, much of the best land in Kenya is already given over to inedible cash crops which only the wealthiest of farmers and dealers make money out of.

Millions face starvation because of lack of food, millions are malnourished because of the lack of variety in their diet. The current drought doesn't help but the gradual loss of land to inedible cash crops or large scale factory farming that is of little benefit and much detriment to the majority continues to push even more to the brink of starvation.

There seemed to be little evidence at the Nairobi Trade Fair that the Ministry of Agriculture and other large and official bodies there were reaching out to small farmers, producers and artisans. In fact, the 250 shilling entry fee and nearly 500 shilling travel costs just from Nakuru would keep most small farmers away, when many of them are lucky to get 150 shillings a day for their work.

There were exceptions. There were solar driers that allow people to save wasting much of their produce that they are unable to sell. There were solar cookers, something very close to my heart. The cookers are very affordable and can even be home made. Anyhow can make them. The driers are not so affordable but again, people can work out how to make them for themselves. There were cooking baskets which can be used to reduce use of solid fuels (and also made at home). And there were even improved cookers that claim to use less fuel or use various kinds of fuel.

But even some of the low cost exhibits forget just how little money people have. One of the improved cookers was ten times the cost of an ordinary 'jiko' or charcoal burning cooker. It's great to see innovative designs but until the inventors and developers of these products find out how to really reduce the cost to one that people just can't refuse, their work will lie on shelves.

Going back to solar cookers, I have tried to use a parabolic cooker, made by lining an umbrella with tinfoil. The focal point gets very hot and it should be possible to cook with it. But, alas, there has only been intermittent sun today so I just have to wait. But this design is only a prototype. Umbrellas and tinfoil are not very durable and they are not produced locally. In the long run, I'd like to be able to construct such a design using local materials, especially recycled materials.

Well, as always, I'll post my progress here as soon as I make further progress.

High Technology and Appropriate Technology

Nakuru is not far from the equator and today we travelled to Mogotio, even closer to the equator. We were there to irrigate onions, peppers and other vegetables. The irrigation process for a small shamba (smallholding) is fiddly and time consuming. The field is beside a river. The pump is petrol operated. But the process of attaching bits of pipe so that the water reaches the farthest parts of the shamba takes several people and a lot of time.

In fact, it's a process of attaching, detaching and re-attaching bits of pipe until the whole job is done. While two people add and remove pipes, two others use hoes to make furrows for the water to flow through and block furrows where adequate water has entered. Why do people not use good lengths of flexible pipe or drip irrigation?

This is a one acre shamba, the kind and size that many Kenyans own. It's for growing small amounts of produce. It's labour intensive but labour is cheap, flexible pipe and other pieces of equipment are expensive. If the shamba was bigger and more productive, we could afford drip irrigation or some other form of irrigation, but this sort of technology is beyond the means of most people here.

So I was pretty annoyed to come across an article about some 'clever' people who have developed a device which allows a farmer to SMS or call a number to turn on their irrigation system. Great, but people who can afford an irrigation system that can be switched on and off don't have to do much work on the shamba themselves. They employ people to do it. It's not the first time I have seen articles about how brilliant mobile phones are. They have their uses but most of the problems poor people suffer don't go away just because they have a mobile phone.

I also came across an article about how Uganda is using mobile phones to spread the 'message' about HIV. Do they really think their unsuccessful and very expensive programmes over the last 20 years failed because of the medium that was used? How much evidence do they need that the problem was not just with the medium?. Many people there and in other countries know all sorts of things about HIV, not all of them true. But they still engage in the sort of behaviour that is thought to spread HIV. So why should spreading the 'message' by mobile phone change anything?

Anyhow, as well as hoeing and irrigating the shamba, we were in Mogotio to demonstrate the process of solar cooking to some people there. We cooked rice, ugali (boiled maize meal) and sukuma wiki (a popular collard green). Sounds a bit starchy but Kenyans like a fair bit of starch. The result was excellent. The area is so hot that things cooked quickly. So the workers in the field were impressed at the large amount of food they were provided with and even more impressed that no charcoal or wood had been used in the cooking process.

I had my worries about the ugali. It is almost worshiped here and getting it wrong could be fatal. But it turned out pretty solid and sticky. I have tried a few other things, stew, various vegetables, even soda bread. They are very good, as long as the sun lasts. So it's time to be more adventurous and do a bit of experimenting. I have no doubt that some 'genius' will be able to invent a device that pulls a screen across the solar cooker when the food is cooked. Until then, I'll just use the time honoured process of looking at the food.

Selling Sunlight on the Equator

We have been trying out the solar cookers. Having faced the problem of too much wind, too much dust, too little sun and too much rain, yesterday started off well and sunny. But half way through the cooking, the sky clouded over and stayed that way. We hadn't even taken the precaution of having some charcoal handy. After a lengthy walk, we got the charcoal and finished cooking the partially cooked food. It was good but not good enough to sell solar cooking to a sceptical audience.

Today was very sunny and, starting earlier, the food was cooked to perfection in less than two hours. The only thermostat available here is experience and I must admit, I left it all on for a bit too long. The food tastes good but is a bit drier than it should be. As it was so sunny, I slipped in a soda bread loaf, which is browning nicely right now. But the sun has again slipped behind the clouds.

So, as a precaution, we could take some cooking baskets with us when we go out in the field. We were hoping to find people to make these baskets for us as they are very expensive in the supermarkets. But we'll get to all that eventually. And we need to make sure that we start early in the morning and that there is charcoal available if things go wrong.

While I cooked today, some people in the house next to me were cooking with charcoal. They were cooking the whole time I was cooking, so it's not just solar cooking that takes a long time. While I cooked, I also washed the clothes, read some articles and wrote a blog entry. I'm just trying to anticipate the comments I'll get!

Well, it could be worse. We are now pretty much prepared to face the hungry mob and demonstrate the process of cooking on a solar cooker. Now that we've tried it out a few times, I feel far more confident. Let's see if I still feel the same way after a few demonstrations. But I love the idea of selling sunlight on the equator.

Solar Cookers and Cooking Baskets

Photo: An IDP camp in Molo, Rift Valley.

Yesterday, myself and two members of a local community based organisation, that I'll be revealing more about in the near future, went to a camp for internally displaced people (IDP), just outside Nakuru. This tent city was set up by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) following the post election violence more than one and a half years ago. The UNHCR has now left the camp and people there are getting by as best they can.

It's disgraceful that the Kenyan government has yet to resettle people properly after all this time. Many of those in the camp find it difficult to get to services and facilities as they are an expensive bus journey away from the town. Even health facilities are hard to get at and people on antiretroviral therapy (ART) are in a particularly precarious position. ART is nominally free in Kenya but there are logistical problems relating to getting to health centres, buying other medicines and the like.

Anyhow, many people in IDP camps see themselves being there for some time. They have planted fields of fruit and vegetables and done their best to be more self reliant. Unfortunately, a herd of buffalo came recently and destroyed much of what they had grown. And the current drought doesn't help either, many crops are stunted or withered because of the lack of rain. But there are also green and flourishing gardens that must have required a lot of care and attention.

Some aid agencies have been to the IDP camp and have given some assistance. But much of that assistance is in the form of handouts of goods and money, which is not sustainable and does not allow people to be self reliant. This community based organisation are advising people on ways of saving in order to be able to access microcredit facilities. They are also advising on potential income generation schemes so that people can get some money for their work or, at least, find out about ways of spending less.

One technique we are hoping to introduce to people is the use of solar cookers for cooking food. The area gets a lot of sun and solar cookers could be used for much of the year. There are numerous advantages to using solar cookers but the advantage we want to make clearest is the cost saving. Charcoal and wood, which people use now, are expensive. They are also in short supply and becoming scarcer. Cutting the amount of smoke people inhale on a daily basis also springs to mind, and the list goes on. Oh, and it's a great way of pasteurising water!

Complementary to solar cookers would be cooking baskets, which are best explained on the Cooking in a Basket blog. These are insulated baskets that cook food which has been partially cooked, thus saving a lot of time and fuel.

In principle, it should be possible to source the materials and makers of these two tools, the solar cooker and the cooking basket, locally. That may take time and we can use ready made ones in the meantime. It may also be possible to get some of the materials free or almost free. Currently, a local sisal unit dumps large amounts of material that would make great insulation padding. But we'll spend the next few weeks working out the logistics and I'll post up our progress as we go along.

Low Emissions Cooking

The Science and Development Network had a couple of interesting articles on cookers, cookers that only require freely available, renewable fuels and cookers that produce less pollution. Environmental degradation and air pollution are serious threats in all countries but especially in developing countries.

Solar cookers have been mentioned on this blog in the past. Now a solar cooker made mainly of cardboard boxes and other cheap, accessible materials has won a prize that will fund the manufacture of the product for developing countries. It's called the Kyoto Box, after the Kyoto Protocol. It's very simple and the fact that it can be made from easy to obtain materials is important where people earn little or no money.

The inventor emphasizes the Kyoto Box's simplicity. We hear a lot of hot air about high technology solutions, such as diagnosing TB using satellite technology or supporting people on antiretroviral therapy using mobile phones. Not that there is anything wrong with these, but they are usually not accessible to people in developing countries and not appropriate to countries with poor infrastructure.

I have heard from several sources that solar cookers are a hard sell, partly because their use can disrupt a daily pattern that people are reluctant to change. For example, women (who usually do the cooking) go to the market in the morning and spend a good while there. They don't just buy and sell things, going to the market is an opportunity to gather with friends and neighbours and keep informed. Yet this is the time when you need to be cooking the midday meal, so cooking by sun may not appeal to everyone.

However, the solar cooker can be used for other things, drying fruit and vegetables. You can produce, for example, sun dried tomatoes, bananas, mangoes, dried mushrooms, fish, etc. Many products need to be sold or preserved and solar cookers can help speed up drying and preservation without requiring much labour. They can also be used for pasteurising water in areas where contaminated water causes much sickness and many deaths.

The Kyoto Box is estimated to save up to two tonnes of carbon emissions per family per year and may be eligible for carbon credits. I hate the thought that people in developing countries will be forced to subsidise the wasteful habits of people in rich countries, as they do that enough already. But I hope the availability of cheap solar cookers will help some people to reduce their daily costs and reap the benefits of a very clean and completely renewable source of fuel.

The other article was about a stove that produces less soot than conventional cooking methods. Soot is the second biggest contributor to climate change, so reducing soot production could have quite an impact on efforts to slow down climate change. Soot and other emissions from traditional cookers also give rise to health problems in the households that use them. Acute respiratory infections are responsible for around 20% of deaths in young children (another 20% being caused by water borne conditions).

This cooker is a problem because of its cost. They cost $20 to make, which is way beyond the means of most poor people, many of whom earn $2 a day or less. It remains to be seen whether rich countries are willing to pay for an intermediate technology that may help us out of the mess that we have created and continue to create.

Whether rich countries are willing to participate in reducing global warming or not, it is good to see intermediate technologies promoted in developing countries. Especially intermediate technologies that can be developed and produced in those countries without expensive materials and expertise that are virtually unavailable there. Far too much aid money is spent on advanced technologies, such as pharmaceutical products, genetically modified organisms and military projects. Spending aid money on these technologies only benefits the rich multinationals who produce them. Aid money should be spent on poor people, not rich people.

Sun Worship and Self Reliance

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of visiting a company in Nairobi that makes, demonstrates and sells solar cooking devices of various kinds; Solar Cookers International (SCI), based in Kileleshwa. These cookers can be used for more than just cooking. They are also great for pasteurising water for consumption, heating water for cleaning, drying foods to preserve them and various other things.

This has numerous advantages: it saves money spent on fuel, prevents destruction of trees and forests, reduces people's exposure to smoke and fumes, cooks food without denaturing nutrients, cooks without dangerous levels of heat, has a very low capital outlay, employs easy to find materials, and even recycled materials, to construct.

I also had the pleasure a couple of months ago of visiting a small community based organisation called Shining Hope for Community (SHOFCO), based in Kibera. They are involved in several projects that support community members. For instance, HIV positive women come to the headquarters several times a week and make bead jewellery which SHOFCO sells on their behalf. Young girls and boys do theatre and other performances to highlight issues that people in Kibera currently face, such as violence, HIV, water and sanitation problems and the like. They also distribute sanitary towels to girls and food to families, when possible.

On Friday, Solar Cookers International visited SHOFCO and spent the best part of the day setting up and demonstrating the process of cooking by sunlight. As a matter of fact, setting up a simple cooker takes seconds, but a number of different styles of cooker were demonstrated. The food was bought and prepared and after around three hours (there was a fair bit of passing cloud to interrupt the vital process!), ten or twelve of us sat down to copious amounts of rice, vegetable, sweet potato, ugali, meat and tea. There was even lots of hot water to do the washing up afterwards.

Before the preparation started there were some sceptical faces, but everyone was fired up by the prospect of seeing this process in action and the added treat of a hearty meal. Faustine and her colleagues from SCI made sure that everyone had a hand in peeling, scraping, chopping and preparing the food. This gave her the chance to insist on rigorous handwashing and care when preparing food. By the time people had got down to the work, they had forgotten their doubts and it wasn't long before the smell of food cooking reassured the doubters.

There was then time for us to go inside and shelter from the blazing sun and discuss what we were involved in. Faustine got people to volunteer answers to questions arising about why anyone would want to use solar cookers. Indeed, people came up with most of the reasons themselves, with little prompting. There were also some welcome questions about some of the drawbacks of these cookers. For instance, what if you are in a hurry, what if it is dark or cloudy or raining?

The answer is that you can't use them under such conditions. The answer is in the question, really. You then need wood, charcoal, kerosene, gas, whatever else you can use for cooking. But even in Nairobi, where there is not all year round sunshine, you could still save yourself a lot of expensive fuel. It's just one technique. Not far from SHOFCO there are people experimenting with biogas. Others use photovoltaic panels, which allow you to charge up batteries to be used later.

When I originally visited SHOFCO I asked them what income generation schemes they had. They mentioned that they made bead jewellery, and that is the main one, at present. Just as solar cookers can't be used when it's raining, bead jewellery can't be sold when there is little or no market. Women make the jewellery but there are few tourists this year because of the post election violence last year. While it is sometimes possible to sell things abroad, markets are difficult to access and not too reliable.

It's still too early to say, but hopefully solar cookers will provide income generating opportunities for organisations like SHOFCO. They could sell, demonstrate or perhaps even make solar cookers. The market is on their doorstep. They will be selling to other Kenyans and benefiting the broader community, not just themselves. There are many other community based organisations that may also be interested in solar cooking.

But there are other technologies that save people money and can even make people money. It's just a matter of people getting together, sharing their ideas and putting them into action. After the solar cookery demonstration, the drama group went to rehearse for a performance. This performance will involve people walking through a market and stumbling upon a solar cookery demonstration. They start off sceptical but gradually see that there is something very interesting to be learned.

Before SCI left SHOFCO, members of each organisation had discussed projects that could be mutually beneficial. I hope those projects are realised. As I said, it's early, but I'll keep in touch and look forward to hearing what happens.

On a similar theme, yesterday I travelled to a village near Thika to visit an orphanage called Watoto wa Barakai (Blessed Children). There are 25 children there but a far larger number of orphans are supported while living with relatives. The place is more like a big family living on a small farm, a beautiful farm. They have cattle, pigs, rabbits and various food crops and they are expanding fast. The people running the orphanage have been very enterprising and have raised a lot of money for the expansion and development.

More importantly, they are interested in sustainability, in particular, in the area of cooking. Trees in the area are being cut down and not replaced. Fuel is expensive and the children (and adults) suffer from respiratory problems. Respiratory problems underlie a huge number of deaths in Kenya, especially among infants and children under the age of five. People running Watoto wa Baraka had already started researching potential technologies, they already have a solar shower and a photovoltaic panel to light one of their buildings. They harvest rain and consider the sustainability of all their projects.

Many people are inspired by intermediate technologies but only some adopt them, ultimately. I think Kenya will only develop if Kenya do the developing and that in many cases, the less Western countries do, the better. Perhaps intermediate technology will be one way that developing countries can become more self reliant.

Aid is for the poor? Really?

One of the most interesting people I met last week works for Solar Cookers International. I have long been interested in solar cookers because they appear to have numerous advantages. In the field of international development this is very significant. Some people see development as being just one thing, population control, globalisation, political circumstances, corruption or whatever. I don't wish to define development but rather to say that, if the problem is malnutrition, food security is an issue, if the problem is a health risk factor such as acute respiratory infections, health is an issue, etc. They all relate to development; development is not just one thing.

Solar Cookers International make cheap solar cookers and other 'intermediate' technologies. More importantly, they give demonstrations and courses on using these technologies. This could play a part in development because it addresses nutrition, health, the environment and many other things. Using a solar oven, then, is not just a matter of cooking; it has implications for the nutritional value of the food, the environment, the economic circumstances of the user, the health of the user, the amount of time spent on domestic tasks, water and sanitation, using recycled materials and a whole lot more. Here's a partial list:

1) They don't require expensive fuel (that means time saved and less environmental degradation)
2) Reduced levels of smoke inhalation, experienced by women cooking and other occupants of kitchen
3) They preserve nutrients in the food because the food cooks more slowly
4) They can be used to pasteurise water and other utensils in areas where water may be contaminated
5) They can be used to heat water for cleaning and washing
6) Training in their use gives people knowledge about many other practical health and social issues
7) Recycled and cheap materials can be used to construct solar ovens, creating employment
8) They are light, portable and take up very little space when stored, compared to other cookers
9) They contribute to increased self reliance and self sufficiency

Another organisation I visited was called SHOFCO, based in Kibera, Nairobi. They carry out a number of activities relating to HIV, education and poverty reduction. I found their details when I was researching the use of income generation schemes as a way of allowing women to reduce and even eliminate their need to resort to commercial sex work.

Kibera is not an ideal place for solar cookers. There is not much space and Nairobi has less sun than many areas. However, there are communal areas in Kibera and there is enough sun to cook on many days of the year. Given the costs and advantages, the cost of a solar cooker would be recouped in a couple of months, perhaps less.

In addition to reducing household costs, it is possible that solar cookers could be produced by people in Kibera as a way of raising income. That's what I'm hoping, anyway. The problem is that many people adopting income generation schemes are undercutting each other's market. In Kibera, some women make and sell bead jewellery. However, there are so many people making and selling bead jewellery that it's getting harder and harder to make any money from it.

If you can't make enough money from your job, whatever it happens to be, you still need to resort to commercial sex work. If times get hard, and they are getting harder in Kibera, each woman needs to have more clients and to engage in more dangerous kinds of sexual intercourse, for example, agreeing not to use a condom. Bad economic conditions increase the vulnerability of people who are already poor, exposing them to HIV and other risks.

I look forward to meeting and hearing from others who have tried out income generation schemes of various kinds, and those who have successfully adopted intermediate technologies.
Renewable energy, of course, is not the only type of intermediate technology. Solar Cookers International also sell cheap and easy to use water testing kits. Many diseases in a country like Kenya are water borne, eg. cholera, E Coli and the many diseases caused by various intestinal parasites. Water and sanitation also play a part in the spread of malaria as mosquitoes breed in stagnant water.

If I seem to hop from one subject to another, I apologise, but these matters are all connected, really!

Cholera and Malaria relate to one of the largest sources of funding for the search to eliminate these problems; I'm referring to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Far from wishing to criticize an organisation that contributes so much to good causes, I'd like to look at disease a different way. The Gates Foundation is putting a lot of money into finding a vaccine for cholera. Yet cholera only exists where there is little or no water and sanitation infrastructure, where people don't have access to clean water.

The cure for cholera is clean water. Dying from cholera means dying of dehydration, perhaps after repeatedly drinking contaminated water. Countries who once had a problem with cholera no longer have that problem because they have addressed water and sanitation issues. A vaccine would be brilliant, except that it would not solve all the other water borne diseases, and there are many. What is the point in surviving cholera only to die of E Coli or hepetitis E?

Malaria is not so simple but again, countries that now have good water and sanitation no longer have malaria. The Gates Foundation has, quite rightly IMHO, been criticized for taking human resources from other projects, overlapping with existing health projects and distorting health funding. The Foundation has prioritised a few diseases when it's not the diseases that are the main problem. It's the risk factors, such as water and sanitation or acute respiratory infections that we should be concentrating on.

There are two other concerns that receive a lot of the Foundation's money: HIV and genetically modified crops (GM). The foundation is interested in finding a cure for HIV or treating HIV positive people and 'feeding the starving', allegedly. But only if these solutions involve intellectual property, it seems, intellectual property being something very close to the Gates heart.

Anti retroviral drugs (ARVs) and GM technologies are pieces of intellectual property. There are very cheaply produced drugs that do the same thing, but US money goes into expensive ARVs, produced by Americans in America. Does this make you think of the free condoms distributed in Mumias?

GM corn is a modified version of the corn that you see hundreds of hectares of between Mumias and Eldoret. But it costs a lot of money and it belongs to the company that produces it, not the person who grows it. A farmer can grow one crop with GM corn before buying more seed, from the GM producer, of course. Using the non GM version, they can save seed and grow corn every year.

Where was I? Oh yes, intermediate technology, such as renewable sources of energy. This technology is owned by whoever uses it. This can be contrasted with high technology, which belongs to very rich multinationals. So, would you choose a cheap technology that eradicates cholera and most other water borne diseases and has many other advantages, or would you choose a very expensive one that only eradicates cholera for those who can afford it? It only works for as long resistance to it is not developed. But then, a new version can be found, at a cost.

Finally, for those working with HIV and AIDS, I hope you have a productive World Aids Day! I'll post the news from Mumias later today or tomorrow.