Small things that change the world
The person who saved more lives than anyone else in recorded history was an agricultural scientist named Norman Borlaug who developed high-yielding crops and thereby prevented an estimated 245 million to 1 billion people from dying in developing countries due to famine. It is amazing to me that the advent of a new and better way of doing something essentially saved at least as many people as the populations of Canada, Australia, France and Great Britain combined. Often I get caught up in the movie drama illusion of feeling like the only way to help people is with larger than life actions. To help the world become a better place I must storm the African jungle and start my own militia to save gorillas like Dian Fossey or kick down doors with my SWAT team to save child sex workers like Aaron Cohen. Most days saving the world seems that it is a job for those who can throw caution to the wind and move mountains with their bare hands.
That is why today I want to honor the Norman Borlaug’s of the world and hopefully I will drum up some inspiration for myself (or you) to find little things that can change the world in big ways.
The Embrace: Portable Incubator
In developing countries, mortality for 20 million premature and low-birth-weight babies each year is particularly high because incubators are extremely rare. The Embrace team began their need finding in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. After spending several days observing the neonatal unit of the Kathmandu hospital, Stanford design students with the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability program asked to be taken outside the city to see how premature infants were cared for in rural areas. They learned two alarming things: First, the overwhelming majority of all premature Nepalese infants were born in these rural areas. And second, most of these infants would never make it to a hospital. They realized that no matter how good their design for a new incubator was, it would never help these babies if it stayed in a hospital. To save the maximum number of lives, their design would have to function in a rural environment. It would have to work without electricity and be transportable, intuitive, sanitizable, culturally appropriate, and perhaps most importantly—inexpensive. By the end of class, the team had created their first prototype of the Embrace Incubator. The design looked something like a sleeping bag. It wrapped around a premature infant, and a pouch of phase-change material (PCM) kept the baby’s body at exactly the right temperature—and maintained this temperature for up to four hours. After four hours, the PCM pouch could be “recharged” by submerging it in boiling water for a few minutes. The Embrace Incubator is small and light, making it easy and inexpensive to transport to rural villages. The entire sleeping bag can be sanitized in boiling water. It is far more intuitive to use than traditional incubators, and fits well into the recommended practice of “Kangaroo Care”, where a mother holds her baby against her skin. Finally, compared to the $20,000 price of a traditional incubator, the Embrace incubator only costs $25.
Life Straw
This one has always been one of my favorites. Basically it is a short tube or “straw” on a necklace that effectively removes all bacteria and viruses from an available water source. This was an invention of Vestergaard Frandsen, a European-based international company specializing in complex emergency response and disease control products. It is guided by a unique Humanitarian Entrepreneurship business model, whose “profit for a purpose” approach has turned humanitarian responsibility into its core business. An individual or company can become a Life Straw supplier through their website.
The Q Drum and The Hippo Roller
Both of these ingenious designs are meant to make carrying large amounts of water more efficient. You can make donations to either of the organizations that manufacture and distribute these products through their websites. Check out the great video below for the full story behind the advent of the Q Drum.
Mighty Mitad
Another Stanford design student (they are really blowing my mind right now – there are several more Stanford shout-outs in this post) with the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability program with the help of engineer Dave Evans visited Ethiopia and found that families spend $20 or more a year buying $4 clay cooking discs called mitads for making the flat injera bread that is a mainstay of their diet. Most mitads break in less than three months. Evans’ innovation: put a steel band around the clay mitad, which enables it to last for years instead of months. The cost of the Mighty Mitad: just $6. An entrepreneur in the Ethiopian city of Awassa is selling the new mitads, and families are using the savings to send their children to school.
Ambulances With Solar Panels
Water Storage System
For most farmers in Myanmar, watering crops is a two-step process. First, the farmer pumps water up from a well into something that can store the water temporarily. Then the farmer uses sprinkler cans to carry the water out to the crops. The water storage device in the middle of this process is often problematic. A hole dug in the ground is the most common solution, but a significant portion of the water seeps out of the bottom of the hole, decreasing productivity. Concrete containers and metal 55-gallon drums are sometimes used to prevent leakage, but are expensive. Another amazing student team at Stanford found inspiration in an unlikely place: origami. They studied how origami artists can fold up a flat sheet of material into a three-dimensional shape, and realized that they could do the same with a flat sheet of tarp material. What’s the advantage of folding rather than cutting and pasting? There are no seams-which are the first things to leak and degrade in a water device. Eventually, the team came up with a rectangular container that could hold 120 gallons of water, without any seams, for under $5. They also demonstrated that this water storage device, the “InfiniCan” could be raised several feet off the ground, providing a farmer with enough gravity pressure to water plants through a hose.
Solar-Powered Refrigerator
Promethean Power Systems of Cambridge, Mass. has developed a solar-powered off-grid refrigeration system for chilling milk where there is unreliable electricity. The plan: rural dairy farmers in India store milk in the cooler’s 500-liter tank. Dairy plants can then pick up the milk every other day instead of twice daily. The innovation is in the design of low-cost heat exchangers. Promethean built a working prototype in Boston last year and has received its first order from a large dairy in India. It costs around $9,000 but will save the dairy money because of reduced transportation costs and reduced spoilage.
Rocket Box Stove
Xela Teco, a small manufacturer in Guatemala, worked with the Boston-based nonprofit Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group to develop a better design for a wood burning stove that uses 50% less wood and funnels the smoke out of the home through a chimney. It sells for around $110; the payback on the stove is about one year, since it can cut in half the average $25 families spend per month for wood.
Solar-Powered Off-Grid Lights
D.light Design is the brainchild of several students in a Stanford graduate design class (ho-hum, Stanford you rock!!!) . The entrepreneurs created solar-powered LED lights for use in rural areas of India. A small solar panel creates electricity to recharge the battery powering the lights. D.light Design is manufacturing its products inexpensively in China and selling lights in India, Tanzania and 28 other countries that range in price from $10 to $45. The company expects to sell upwards of 1.5 million lights this year.
2 Comments
LaurenHey! I just spent an hour or so on your site reading your different articles. Fascinating!! Thanks for doing all that research and stuff- it’s really important to consider that stuff, especially with a little cutie pie around. I’m gonna tell my sister about the site.
Love It!