Rwanda

Grantee news: Colorado-Boulder students launch Manna Energy

Submitted by dave on Fri, 07/23/2010 - 10:58

In 2004, NCIIA awarded a Course and Program grant to the University of Colorado at Boulder to support the development of a course now called Engineering for the Developing World. Recently, two students from the first offering of the course launched Manna Energy, LTD, a social venture that has as its first focus implementing an economically sustainable water treatment system in Rwanda. Manna Energy has already won $300,000 from two competitions. Read the press release.

 

 

 

Pico-hydro Electric Power for Isolated Villages

Dartmouth College, 2009 - $36,900

With most of sub-Saharan Africa’s population spread over remote rural areas, the difficulty and high cost of running transmission lines to individual homes makes it impossible for much of the population to tie into electric grids. Local, decentralized solutions are the answer, and this team is taking that approach with the development of locally manufacturable, pico-hydropower technology. The team designed a novel, mechanical, low cost pico-hydro system that runs off of small amounts of water diverted from a river or stream into a holding tank. Water is piped down to a turbine from the holding tank, rotating a wheel connected to a standard automotive alternator that generates electricity.

The team has implemented its low cost system in Rwanda, and a profitable business has developed around it in which people pay to have batteries recharged at the station. This grant supports the installation of a system at a second site and the development of a replicable, scalable business model for local ownership and operation.

Technology Commercialization in Developing Countries

Rice University, 2009 - $32,000

With the purpose of addressing the astounding rates at which children in developing countries die each year due to lack of access to health technologies (often due to ineffective and unsustainable distribution systems), the Rice Institute for Global Health Technologies and Graduate School of Management will create a new technology commercialization course. The new course will focus on bringing engineering students who have already designed new health technologies with MBA students to develop business plans for these technologies in low-resource settings. Students will receive field experience in a developing country to gather information and identify local entrepreneurs and partners, and will produce and implement businesses to disseminate their technologies in developing countries.

This program will build on the success of a past course in technology commercialization course offered in spring 2009. In the course, four teams of MBA students developed business plans for assigned health technologies (created by Rice engineering students). With private philanthropic support, the students traveled to Rwanda during spring break and met with government officials and potential consumers from hospitals and clinics with the purpose of determining market size, potential consumers, price points, and product marketability. The new course will allow engineering and MBA students to work closely together in an interdisciplinary educational experience. MBA students will travel to Rwanda again in spring 2010, expanding on the business plans of former teams and developing plans for new products.

High Efficiency Stove Microenterprise

 

University of Colorado - Boulder, 2008 - $31,185

Lower respiratory infections are the second leading cause of death in Rwanda.  Many of these deaths can be attributed to indoor air pollution from cooking stoves that can simply be described as indoor campfires.  It is hard to believe that the cost of this deadly wood represents the majority of a Rwandan family’s household income because of the large deforestation problem. To alleviate this problem, students from the University of Colorado at Boulder Engineers Without Borders Chapter designed and implemented a high efficiency stove to better utilize limited resources and provide cleaner more efficient cooking conditions. The stoves are made from all local materials including pumice, an abundant resource in the area with ideal thermal properties.

Summer 2009 Update: After the success of this project and interest from Rwandans, the project is ready to be taken to the next level and converted to a sustainable micro-enterprise, eventually led and owned by Rwandan citizens. This will not only alleviate much of the clear-cutting of trees, but also increase the financial stability in Rwanda.

Below, team member Christie Chatterley talks about the Sustainable Vision workshop she attended, and how it helped.


 
 

Working on a stove design.

Update:

 

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