of a kerosene lantern. Now
he’s making solar-charged
lanterns and using them to spur
economic development.
EVANS WADONGO, 271.3 billion
Number of people worldwide without access to electricity SO13_humanitarians.indd 64 8/6/13 5:08 PM65
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Photograph by David Talbot
Wadongo (right) checks on the production of LED lamp housings in a workshop on the outskirts of Nairobi.
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who had no financial stake in them. But the lanterns normally each cost 2,000 Kenyan shillings (about $23), which is out of many villagers’ reach. So he uses dona- tions (including proceeds from a recent exhibition of his lamps at a Manhattan art gallery, at which donors gave $275 apiece) to provide initial batches of lamps to vil- lages. Residents are generally quick to see the value in the LED lamps because of the money they save on kerosene. Wadongo then encourages them to put the resulting savings into local enterprises.
The transformation in Chumvi began two years ago, when a woman named Eunice Muthengi, who had grown up there and went on to study in the United States, bought 30 lanterns and donated them to women in the village. Given that the fuel for one $6 kerosene lamp can cost $1 a week, the donation not only gave people in the town a better, cleaner light source but freed up more than $1,500 a year. With this money, local women launched a village microlending service and built businesses making bead crafts and handbags. “We’re now able to save 10 to 20 shillings [11 to 23 cents] a day, and in a month that amounts to something worthwhile,” says Irene Peter, a 43-year- old mother of two who raises maize and
tomatoes. “Personally, I saved and got a sheep who has now given birth.” She also got started in a business making orna- ments and curios.
As profits rolled in from new enter- prises like these, the women who got the original 30 lamps gradually bought new batches; according to Wadongo, they now have 150. “Their economic situation is improving, and this is really what keeps me going,” he says, adding that some peo- ple are even making enough to build bet- ter houses. “The impact of what we do,” he says, “is not in the number of lamps we dis- tribute but how many lives we can change.” Wadongo is also changing lives with the manufacturing jobs he is creating. In an industrial area of Nairobi, banging and clanking sounds fill a dirt-floored shack as two men hammer orange and green scraps of sheet metal into the bases of the next batch of lamps (soon to be spray-painted silver). Each base is also stamped with the name of the lamp—Mwanga Bora (Swa- hili for “Good Light”). The three men in the workshop can make 100 lamp hous- ings a week and are paid $4 for each one. Subtracting rent for the manufacturing space, each man clears $110 per week—far above the Kenyan minimum wage.
Some of the lamps are completed in the kitchen of a rented house in Nairobi. Three LED elements are pushed through a cardboard tube so they stand up inside the lantern’s glass shade. The LED ele- ments, photovoltaic panel, and batteries are sourced from major electronics com- panies. Overall, the devices are rugged; the steel in the housing of the lantern is a heavy gauge. If a housing breaks, it can be serviced locally—and the electronic parts are easily swapped out.
Wadongo now heads Sustainable Development for All, the NGO that gave him his leadership training, and he is focusing it on expanding the lamp produc- tion program. It has made and distributed 32,000 lamps and is poised to increase that number dramatically by opening 20 manufacturing centers in Kenya and Malawi. Wadongo says that teams in those centers will independently manufacture not only the lamps but “any creative thing they want to make.” —David Talbot
Top left: In Chumvi, Kenya, Irene Peter helps her son with English homework by LED light, which is cleaner and less expensive than kerosene. Bottom left: Each lamp is stamped “Mwanga Bora,” which means “Good Light” in Swahili.
Above: A worker hammers scrap metal to form a lantern housing. Bottom right: Christine Mbithi, a mother of four in Chumvi, chops spin- ach by LED lamplight.
P REVIOU S SPRE A D: D ATA F R OM INTERNA TIONAL ENER GY AG E NC Y JO E M AT H AI ( PETER , MBITHI) , D A VID T ALBO T (LAMP , W ORK SHOP ) SO13_humanitarians.indd 67 8/6/13 5:09 PM
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In her work as an epidemiologist, Caroline Buckee thinks a lot about malaria—but the same could have been said when she was six years old. “There’s a story my dad tells about my dinnertime conversation when I was little,” she says. “I often used to say things like, ‘What’s your favorite disease?’ And it turns out my favorite was malaria.”
The obsession never quite waned, because malaria is caused by “a fas- cinating organism,” says Buckee, now an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. “It’s really a shape- shifter. It evolves very quickly to anything we throw at it. It’s a clever parasite.” And most disturbing, she says, even though it is treatable and preventable, malaria
is still among the biggest infectious-disease killers of children.
In 2006, during a research trip to Kenya, it occurred to her that work her husband, Nathan Eagle (himself an Inno- vator Under 35 in 2009), was doing with data about cell-phone use might be employed in the service of malaria prevention. What if, Buckee wondered, loca- tion data from cell phones were used to intuit a malaria outbreak’s point of origin? Locals might then be warned via text messages to avoid the area or use bed netting. Health officials could know where to con- centrate their mosquito- spray efforts.
Indeed, when Buckee pored over data from 15 million Kenyan cell phones, telltale patterns emerged. People who had made calls or sent mes- sages through a certain phone tower were extremely likely to later visit a region near Lake Victoria where malaria wound up erupting in force. The area near that tower was probably the origi- nal hot spot—and thus where health officials should focus.
Buckee and her colleagues are still fig- uring out the best way to use this data (which was one of MIT Tech-
nology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Tech-
nologies of 2013). But the results so far give her confidence that she’s found a crucial tool for her work in epidemiol- ogy. “The ubiquity of cell phones is really changing how we think of diseases,” she says. —Timothy Maher