Solar carts for basic needs (1 Viewer)

[Linda]

I am interested in the small things that make life easier and more self-sufficient for regular people, and I found another one. In many places in Africa, women and children walk long distances to get water. Some travel as much as 3 miles round trip carrying heavy containers and often make multiple trips. Jose Paris, a car designer in London, developed a 3-wheel cart that moves with a small engine powered by solar cells. It cleverly is named watt-r.

The simple new cart, still in development, will likely carry a dozen 20-liter containers of water at a time, as an entrepreneur walks next to it. Solar power, not human power, will propel it forward. Instead of an engine, it will use a 150-watt electric bike motor, controlled with a simple throttle and tiller. When the entrepreneur stops in a village or city to sell the water, the cart can also double as a charging station for mobile phones or other small electronics.

He sees the design as fitting into an underused category of transportation. “When you look at these developing countries, there seems to be this idea that people just walk, and then they graduate to a Toyota pickup truck . . . in my mind, there’s quite a lot of room in the middle,” he says. “A lot of innovation can happen in those forgotten spaces, that we have forgotten in the West for 120 years, but for them, is crucial. The key thing is now you can add just a little bit of 21st-century technology, and all of the sudden, something from the 19th century becomes super modern.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/40467193/this-solar-powered-cart-is-designed-to-change-the-african-water-delivery-business

 

[Lila]

This one might be right up there with other simple innovations for everyday use that I love.
Some I recall:
- clear bottles full of water put on a piece of metal in the sun to heat-disinfect the water. The only issue I had with that one was that I hoped glass bottles replaced the plastic ones
- clear bottles again... this time placed into carefully carved holes just their size in the top of a slum house that would otherwise be too dark to, say, chop vegetables for dinner in. The bottle full of water acts to bring the light in. Simple. Plus it creates jobs
- cell phones, though they have their downsides, have apparently transformed the small entrepeneur marketplace in lots of small towns where business is slow and infrequent. With a mobile phone, one can go about one's business until one's special skill is needed, then make an appointment by phone. Bike + phone = viable small business model.
- microbusiness loans. Can't recall the name of that organization that started this trend but do recall that all kinds of amazing, but very small businesses came about as the result of someone making the time to give out tiny loans that big banks would ignore. Huge socioeconomic changes followed in entire regions. Really gets very little press, but this is the type of idea that creates real change with a groundswell effect.
- Heifer International is an aid organization that gives out an animal at a time (or a group, say, with a beehive) to a family so that they can become self-sufficient. One of the amazing things that follows is a commitment that the receiver makes to give some offspring to the next family in need. In places where war has devastated the social structure as well as the economic one, this provides a simple and very powerful tool for building bridges between once-not-so-friendly neighbours so that they can look each other in the eye again