Designing Back Time
The story of how one Tanzanian farmer turned into a designer — and created products to save herself precious time at the palm oil press.
Reading the Gates Foundation’s Annual Letter recently, I was struck by the compelling case Melinda Gates made for saving women time and energy.
To her, it’s key to accomplishing our collective global development goals. And she doesn’t limit her argument to gender equality — she explains how it’s connected to building healthy and prosperous families, resilient communities, and strong economies.
She explained that women spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work — and “the burden of that unpaid work falls heaviest on women in poor countries, where hours are longer and the gap between women and men is wider.”
Melinda wrote that if she had a superpower for good, she would take back time.
For Mwanaharusi Goha, a single mother and small-scale farmer in Morogoro, Tanzania, those 4.5 hours were spent extracting palm oil. Palm oil is a popular product in Tanzania, often used for cooking and making soap. But it requires an incredible amount of manual labor to produce through traditional methods, which involve a bulky machine and two operators to stand and crank for hours on end.
In 2013, Bernard Kiwia and Noela Bybachwezi — two innovators trained in user-led design by MIT D-Lab — led a hands-on design and innovation training through the Innovations in Gender Equality program (which was implemented by Land O’ Lakes and supported by ). Goha was part of a team that identified palm oil processing as a challenge in their local community.
Kiwia and Bybachwezi taught the team about the design cycle and gave them a few hand tools to work with. Soon, Goha’s team began to prototype an improved palm oil press, one that required only a single seated operator instead of several operators required to stand. The resulting machine could extract 20 liters of palm oil in just 30 minutes, an impressive improvement over the four hours normally required for the task.
Goha was taken with the power of the design process. She continued to work on her team’s prototype after the training was complete, optimizing the technology based on user feedback from women in her village.
In 2014, Goha’s passion for design was recognized when she was chosen as one of nearly 50 international innovators to attend the annual International Development Design Summit organized by the International Development Innovation Network (IDIN) in nearby Arusha, Tanzania.
At the summit, innovators divided into diverse teams charged with identifying and addressing a local challenge over the course of a month. Teams worked closely with local community stakeholders to both identify problems and develop solutions, often rapidly prototyping a technology that could improve on a current process.
Goha’s team included an El Salvadorian nonprofit worker, a Brazilian engineering student, a Ghanaian engineering student, a German industrial designer, and a Tanzanian business school student.
Working with farmers in a rural village not far from the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the team’s goal was to develop a better solution for shelling coffee beans, another time-consuming agricultural process.
Small-scale farmers in the area typically use a hand crank system to shell raw coffee cherries manually harvested in local fields. The team immersed themselves in the process, picking coffee cherries from local fields, testing out the hand crank system themselves, and spending time in the village to better understand the available local materials and tools.
They found their solution in an everyday vehicle common to the area — a bicycle. The team attached a bicycle frame to the existing hand crank system, providing a simple and more enjoyable way to pulp more than 30 pounds of coffee cherries in just ten minutes.
Toward the end of their trip, in a community demonstration, kids and adults alike clamored to have a turn on the bike, and then to provide feedback to the team on how to improve the device.
Goha brought something special to the team as a Tanzanian woman and farmer who intimately understood day-to-day life in a Tanzanian village.
How will a woman shell the coffee beans on a bicycle and avoid getting her skirt tangled in the chains? What is the appropriate seat height? Can it be made adjustable for women and kids to ride at different times? How will we catch the coffee beans once they are shelled to ensure quality?
Through a translator, Mwanaharusi admitted that when she first came to the summit she had some doubts. She wondered what she could contribute to her team and the process. She had been a farmer for decades; it was what she knew. Being a farmer and a designer was something new. But growing confidence in her own experience helped to erase those doubts and allowed her to find her voice.
“I haven’t danced in 20 years, but now, because of this, I dance,” she said in Swahili, with a wide smile.
As the summit came to a close, Goha did dance. Together with her team, they celebrated the progress they had made with a careful eye on the progress yet to be made. Goha was anxious and excited to go home and share what she had learned with women in her village.
It didn’t take long for Goha to apply what she had learned back at home in Morogoro. She built a bicycle-powered palm oil press within a matter of just a few months, and began engaging women in her village, sharing what she had learned at the summit and encouraging them to develop solutions to other challenges.
The ECHO East Africa Impact Center partnered with IDIN after the summit to provide support to the growing ecosystem of local innovators in the area. Goha was one of many innovators awarded small grants, or “picogrants” by ECHO in 2015 to further develop her prototype.
During the months following the award, she has addressed different aspects of the machine’s development, iterating to improve its production, safety, efficiency, and consistency. Her latest prototype is run by a diesel engine. It works well enough to provide income for her family, and also provides an opportunity for several other families, who pay just a small fee to use the machine and in turn increase their own palm oil production capabilities.
In November 2015, Goha reported that she can process 20 buckets of palm oil per day with a pressing cost of just Tsh 3000 ($1.37 USD) per bucket, generating a net profit of Tsh 30,000 ($14.20 USD), a significant income in Morogoro.
“Mwanaharusi’s machine is highly needed in her village,” said ECHO Appropriate Technology Coordinator Harold Msanya. “She is addressing a real community problem. Every time I call Mwanaharusi, I find her with a new story about the impact she is making with her work, and a new development in the machine she would like to make.”
She has also shared her other working prototypes with two local women’s groups who are using the technologies to produce palm oil more efficiently on their own farms. Others from Morogoro have approached her to express interest in buying a machine of their own.
In this way, Goha’s superpower is not only taking back her own time — it’s taking back the time of an entire village.
What’s she doing with that extra time? Goha is still intent on making her machine better and better, but I’d also like to think she’s taking some of that newfound time to dance.
The Development Set is made possible by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We retain editorial independence.
