About forty minutes from the center of Dar es Salaam by car, near the Julius Nyerere International Airport, is a small fenced-in set of buildings in a town called Kitunda. These buildings house the Science and Technology Innovation Center and Laboratories, or STICLab. I had an opportunity to visit STICLab with my fellow interns and found both an inspiring story of entrepreneurship and a demonstration of the ever-increasing presence of technology and engineering in Tanzania.
Just getting to STICLab is an experience for someone from outside Tanzania. The main road to get from DIT to STICLab is the same road that Aarohi and I experienced coming from the airport into Mchafukoge, where our hotel is located. As a result, this road served as a kind of first impression of Tanzania. The main thing that surprised me was the number of people on the side of the street. It was striking to see so many people just walking around – some buying or selling various things and others seemingly with no definite purpose, often greeting other pedestrians as friends. Closer to the center of the city, many people were walking along the lines of traffic selling various foods and objects – in our first taxi ride, Aarohi and I were surprised to see a salesman approaching car windows to demonstrate two of the large knives he was selling. On the way to STICLab, we passed the same man before turning onto a side road.
The side road was like many smaller streets that we have seen throughout Dar es Salaam. While the central roads are not unlike those in the United States, the side roads are often made from dirt or sand. These degrade at certain points, leaving pits and bumps that make car travel slow, difficult, and bumpy. Along the sides of these streets are houses and businesses, many with hand-painted signs or advertisements and owners or customers standing outside, which gives these streets a welcoming atmosphere. On some of the roads, chickens, goats, and even cows owned by nearby families roam free. But while each street seems unique, many are not marked clearly or extend in seemingly random directions, making navigation difficult.
From where we finally left the cars, we walked down a small drive and past a house with several children playing in the yard. Just beyond this, STICLab is run from a similar house that once belonged to one of the founders.
STICLab is surrounded by a chain link fence and concentrated around the main house, which contains offices, an electrical/mechanical prototyping space, and a machine room with 3D printers, a CNC machine, a tensile testing machine, and three microscopes undergoing fatigue testing as part of an open lab instrumentation project. In this room, all devices except one 3D printer were built at STICLab.
Around the main office, there are several large pavilion-style tents with hydroponic farming setups as part of an ongoing process to cultivate lettuce within Tanzania. A few other buildings and tents that we did not get to see are arranged around the rest of the lot. One area contains the water tower for the property, on which a water level monitoring and redistribution system is being tested for a local hospital.
In the open space between, a few men are cutting and assembling a metal frame for an unknown purpose. STICLab manages several projects at a time, variously funded by local and international grants or contracted by local businesses.
STICLab was founded by a group of students and one professor from DIT. They achieved early success for their MajiPesa system, a solar-powered water vending and tracking system that takes coins to dispense water while relaying various information to the owner of the machine through a web interface. The system is sold to those responsible for supplying water and helps them to easily manage several machines at once while increasing the simplicity and transparency of water transactions.
In Tanzania, these water distribution points are often the only nearby source of water in a community. As a result, they have historically been a gathering place for community members. An article on NewGlobal accounts how one MajiPesa owner has set up retail spaces near the water system; the businesses that rent the space will have guaranteed foot traffic, improving their reach and profitability. Thus, MajiPesa has served as a method of bringing technology and entrepreneurship into a timeless cultural fixture. This is a great example of Tanzanian design focused on uniquely-African needs – because water delivery is not common in many areas of the world, no comparable system existed.
For contrast, we can look at PlayPump, an oft-cited example as a failure of global engineering design. The PlayPump was a high-profile effort aimed at solving the problem of water availability in village settings across Africa (focused in South Africa) by harnessing the energy of school children spinning a merry-go-round to pump groundwater from an aquifer into a water tower for later access. The successes and failures of the PlayPump have been analyzed extensively in media, from travel and global health blogs to PBS’s Frontline.
The PlayPump achieved success in some settings but is generally thought of as a failure because it was expensive, ineffective in some regions, and prone to failure without regular maintenance. In addition to some engineering, ethical, and basic feasibility concerns, the PlayPump failed to properly anticipate two important considerations in global low-resource design – maintenance plan and cultural interaction.
The success of a maintenance plan is largely dependent on the presence of capable technicians and the cost of repairs. Each PlayPump has an initial cost of about $14,000 to cover materials, installation, and water testing this cost is provided entirely by donors. In an attempt to offset some of this expense, the water tower contains two company advertisements. While it is difficult to know the exact economics of this, it is reasonable to say that the majority of funding still came from donors. In addition, maintenance has to be provided from donor funds. Because funding has to be secured for any repairs, PlayPumps have faced the issue of breaking and sitting unused for long periods. This reveals a major flaw with the PlayPump model – that the community has no stake in the technology. It is designed, funded, and installed by outside sources and relies on external maintenance. Even if someone in a certain community has the skills to fix a broken pump, they lack the funding and motivation. The lack of motivation comes from the other consideration, cultural interaction.
While choosing the energy source of children playing shows some consideration of cultural setting, the PlayPump displays an ignorance of the way that water is traditionally acquired in these communities: community members, often women, walking to the nearest water source and retrieving it. This became significant because the solution did not account for this existing tradition; in fact, the PlayPump eliminated this source of social interaction entirely when it was able to work successfully. This decreased motivation to repair the pumps significantly. The cost and hassle of repairing the PlayPump were so high and the community stake in the technology so low that the device was unlikely to be repaired.
Although MajiPesa is meant for a different environment and solves a slightly different problem, it is a tremendous example of the future of design that Rice 360 and other global design institutions are trying to support – solutions driven by local stakeholders that account for the needs and cultural settings of the area. The differences between MajiPesa and PlayPump on these factors are striking. While PlayPump was driven by outside donors, MajiPesa is created by a local company and owned by local entrepreneurs. This means that when the system encounters some issue, a local owner is financially motivated to fix it and can lean on resources that are available locally to get the technology repaired. More significantly, MajiPesa not only accounts for but embraces local cultural resources. It replaces the outdated parts of water supply without ignoring the role of water gathering in the community. In fact, adding transparency and consistency to the system has allowed for the incorporation of technology and business into the existing behavior. Because the technology is locally designed, it can also adapt to the rapid changes occurring in Tanzania. When the machine was first prototyped, it took only coins to dispense water. In recent years, however, m-pesa (a mobile money transfer system) has become popular in Tanzania; in consideration of this, current MajiPesa machines will soon take m-pesa payments to dispense water. Designs like the PlayPump that are subject to outside funding and generate no community stake do not adapt to a rapidly-changing modern Africa.
As I reflect more on STICLab, I am convinced that this kind of innovative maker space/business is critical to the successful advancement of technology in Tanzania and similar countries. From the interaction we have had with the people at STICLab, it is difficult to get a complete picture of how the business functions. It is clear, however, that it is built around a group of good engineers using available resources to provide feasible, lasting technologies suited to the unique needs of their environment. This allows STICLab to use cutting-edge technology while still maintaining a connection with the local environment. Over the rest of my time in Tanzania, I plan to consider how this spirit and business model can be adapted to satisfy medical needs, which often require even more complex funding sources and market considerations.
