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We’re headed to New York and hosting a networking party on Thursday, October 7th at Lolita from 9-11pm. We’ll have drink specials, Catapult merch for sale, a short introduction to Catapult’s work, and an introduction by Board member Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger.com. We’ll have guests from FrontlineSMS:Credit, The Future Well, Pop!Tech, All Day Buffet, Assetmap, and more!
Click here to buy your tickets ($5) via Eventbrite, or drop your donation at the door.
See you all there!
President Obama declared a state of emergency in Arizona this winter after 54 inches of snow fell on the Navajo Nation, leaving many rural families stranded without heat, electricity, or fresh food. Traditionally a population of sheepherders, a majority of Navajo families live rurally and sometimes completely cut off from the outside world when winter snow and summer rain make the network of reservation dirt roads impassible. I met Lena and her brother Nelson outside Kinlichee, AZ just before the heavy snow fell earlier this year. Lena’s modest five foot by ten foot concrete home had two kerosene lanterns for lighting, a cast iron stove for heat, a mattress for sleeping, a basin for bathing, and a propane tank sitting outside the house with a hose snaking through a cracked window to a stovetop.
Wood for heating, and re-used milk jugs for daily water collection
Needless to say, Lena and Nelson, both in their forties, have never had access to electricity or running water. An outhouse 50 yards from Lena’s home serves as their bathroom; a local stream provides the water they need for cooking, bathing, and cleaning. Ironically, a high voltage power line buzzes overhead about five-minute from their house.
The Native American population is the most poverty-stricken community in the United States and continually plagued by health and environmental issues, gang activity, and political drama that overshadow efforts to retain and strengthen tribal culture. After decades of sovereignty, many Native American communities mimic the conditions you would find in developing countries.
I made a second trip to Lena and Nelson’s community a few months after meeting them, long after the snow melted and this time with the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA), the entity responsible for providing Navajo reservation residents with electricity, water and natural gas. The NTUA is turning to off-grid, renewable solutions for its most remote customers. We drove one hour to a home just west of Monument Valley with an 880W (not enough for most US homes, but respectable) hybrid wind-solar energy system. The distance alone makes servicing the system a huge time-commitment and requires a heavy-duty truck to take on the precarious “roads.”
Hybrid wind-solar system near Monument Valley
For Navajo families waiting for electricity, basic math reveals that their chance of receiving a grid connection in their lifetime is slim to none. The NTUA estimates the cost of a power line at $20,000 per mile. Even if each of the 18,000 people without electricity lived a mere five miles from the nearest line, that’s an estimated $1.8 billion dollars to electrify all remaining homes. The NTUA collects approximately $50 per month from each electrified home – at that rate, payback for grid connection is on the order of 1000 years.
The Navajo Reservation has the largest landmass of any tribe at 27,000 square miles and housing roughly 175,000 people. Urban areas are sparse and the number of people living in them and paying for utilities is not enough to effectively subsidize the infrastructure development for those living remotely, as it did in the rest of the country. Which means that on the Navajo Nation, off-grid renewable sources of power are less about dependence on oil and more about necessity. But beyond that, it’s also about alleviating poverty. De-centralized energy systems hold great potential for rural, impoverished areas worldwide. The tangible effects of electricity include refrigeration of vaccines, powering of small electronics (radios, cell phones) that create a virtual bridge to the rest of the world, and lighting that doesn’t spew black carbon into the home. $1.8B is not a trivial amount. But it prompts the question: what is the price tag on health and well-being here at home and abroad?
“Failure is success if we learn from it.”
-Malcolm S. Forbes
——
Join Catapult Design on Day Two at SOCAP ’10 in San Francisco for the first west coast FAILFaire, a forum for open and honest discussion around failed initiatives within social enterprise. Moderated by Catapult, all SOCAP attendees are invited to participate by presenting their failures that led to greater understanding or later successes. Whether it be a failed initiative, a failed business relationship, or a failure in implementation, we will provide a safe venue for discussion, insight, and lessons learned. The objective of the 90-minute session: to learn from the mistakes of others, and perhaps contribute to someone else’s success in the process.
The first FAILFaire was organized by MobilActiv, a non-profit connecting people, organizations, and resources using mobile technology for social change, in New York and followed by a DC FAILFaire hosted by the World Bank. Originally focused on fail stories from ICT and mobile development, the SOCAP FAILFaire opens up the topic to social enterprise and technology. As an organization focused on the development of transformational technologies for people living in disadvantaged communities, we’ve witnessed firsthand the profusion of abandoned and ignored technologies collecting dust in rural hospitals, schools, and homes. We’ve also witnessed organizations falling prey to the same mistakes made by previous organizations. Yet these stories are for the most part hidden, when they could directly benefit the community at large.
So if you’ve been part of a project that didn’t quite work out, join us on October 5th and tell your story! We want to hear and learn from you.
For those who can’t attend, check back on our blog for the major takeaways from the event!
I’ve just recently returned from Rwanda where Catapult is conducting an energy audit on a hospital in Gitwe, southwest of Gitarama in the Ruhango District, for a back-up energy system. When a structure (home, hospital, school) is connected to the grid, it doesn’t necessarily mean that electrical power is acquired in the same way it is for Catapult’s studio in San Francisco. Below is a quick diagram illustrating how power is purchased for a grid-connected home in rural or urban Rwanda. Pre-paid energy systems don’t capture energy usage patterns in the same way our electrical bills do, making energy audits a little tricky. Something to keep in mind if you’re assessing energy needs in grid-connected communities…
Community based clean water system that can serve 5000 people
The lack of clean drinking water for one billion people around the world, from an engineering perspective, is one of the most baffling problems on the planet. Consider the vast number of water sanitation organizations and the fact that we’ve known how to effectively sanitize our drinking water for centuries. Yet somehow diarrheal disease (caused from drinking unsafe water) remains a top killer of children around the world. In some cases, a simple low-cost filter is all that is necessary to save a life.
Of course, the problem of clean water is not that cut and dry. Most organizations that ask us about water technologies are not sure what they are looking for, they just know that it’s a problem they should be addressing. If this is you, we’ve put together a Water Assessment workshop with overall guidelines on the steps you would take to gather the information you need to select a sanitation technology. In addition to that, here’s the top five things to consider if you’re contemplating a clean water program:
There are three main types of water contaminants and no single technology is effective against all of them. Start by figuring out what is contaminating the water. To do this, you may need a local university lab on your side to help with the analysis. Or, you might check to see if a local organization has already conducted water tests in your region.
Checking Manna's gravel-sand water filtration system.
The danger happens when you assume an expensive carbon filter will solve all of your problems in every community you enter. You may need to combine a natural, low-tech filter (sand) with a higher-tech ultraviolet radiation. (Check out Manna Energy’s system in Kigali, Rwanda).
And understand that simply surveying the community won’t get you the answer you need. Spend time observing how people use water. Observe if they treat drinking water differently than clothes-washing water. Is water ever reused? Are there differences in water collection points? Understanding usage patterns and user values will help you understand where and how clean water needs to enter the picture.
Both have their positives and negatives. The main drivers: cost, maintenance (who will fix a broken system if no one technically owns it?), and access.
If we pour clean water into a dirty cup, our efforts are for naught. Clean water programs need to be coupled with sanitation training. They both need the other to be truly effective. This is oftentimes a point of failure for water programs – both sanitation and clean water treatment require some semblance of education and behavioral change. Always a challenge.
It goes without saying that if there were to be a #6, it would be this: do not reinvent the wheel! As mentioned in the opening paragraph, countless water organizations and technologies exist. Leverage and adapt them.
image from Global Envision
In most developing countries, almost half of all births take place in the home often with the assistance of a birth attendant. According to a study by the International Center for Advancing Neonatal Health at Johns Hopkins, a major factor contributing to neonatal and maternal infections is delivery in the home under unhygienic conditions by untrained birth attendants. The use of a clean delivery kit has a dramatic effect on maternal health, reducing infection and the incidence of sepsis.
We’re excited to announce our latest project with AYZH, a social venture looking through the eyes of women to identify the tools they want and need to help improve their standard of living. Founded by Zubaida Bai, a recent graduate of the Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise Program who formerly worked for a Lemelson foundation initiative in India, AYZH serves the needs of impoverished women worldwide by bringing them affordable appropriate technologies that increase income and/or improve health. One of AYZH’s first products on the market includes a clean delivery birth kit. Catapult joins this program to evaluate cost, branding, and a sustainability strategy for kit components, currently piloting in India. More program info to come!
The outhouse, with our tents and hogan in the distance.
We pitched our tents outside our host family’s hogan outside Sawmill, AZ on day one of CataCAMP. Our hosts, the Begay Family, had a generator to power a refrigerator, a kerosene lamp, and a small propane tank with a hose snaking through a kitchen window to a stove range. We could see and hear the buzzing of a distant high-voltage power line from our tents, but the Begay’s home was just out of range for access to electricity or running water.
According to the the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA) – the entity responsible for providing the Navajo reservation with electricity, water and natural gas – 18,000 people on the reservation still do not have electricity in their homes. On day four of CataCAMP, we drove an hour down a bumpy dirt road with the NTUA to reach a home just west of Monument Valley with a hybrid wind-solar energy system, one of the off-grid renewable systems the NTUA turns to for its most remote customers. The distance alone makes servicing the system a large time-commitment, but it also requires a heavy-duty truck to take on the nearly impassable “roads.” The system size (880W for a hybrid system) these families receive are standardized to reduce costs. However, this means that when a family plugs in their refrigerator the electricity “stops working.”
Solar system for a remote family.
It was interesting to listen to the NTUA’s reasoning behind the use of standardized systems when we have tried so hard with our clients to produce custom-sized systems that anticipate future energy needs. The systems on the reservation were lacking, but they adequately performed the main job they were there to do: provide immediate power for moderate energy needs at a cost cheaper than running a electrical line to a house.
System sizing can be a tricky business. Before visiting with the NTUA, our team went through a basic energy assessment workshop called “Present and Future Power Needs” (PDF, 225KB), based on our experience with our Rwanda Solar PV project. The workshop outlines the process of cataloging appliances to understand how much power you need, and uses that number to derive how many solar panels and batteries you need in your energy system. However, what we have witnessed (and what the Solar Electric Light Fund [SELF] has witnessed) is that once we have electricity we tend to over use it if a feedback loop is not in place. Our sizing template accounts for that anticipated over use with a formula supplied to us by SELF.
While the second half of the workshop is specific to solar, the first half is relevant to any entity that wants to understand what size energy system they need. Knowing that number will affect your cost and your choice in technology (wind, solar, biogas, etc). Regardless of what technology you choose, it should be accompanied by training, maintenance and feedback loop that educates the user on consumption.
System sizing references: Green Empowerment
Catapulters head to Boulder, CO this week to take part in the Unreasonable Institute‘s Summer Institute, a 10-week program uniting up to 25 young social entrepreneurs with bold ideas from around the world. The Unreasonable Institute was founded by Daniel Epstein and Teju Ravilochan with this simple idea: give high-impact social entrepreneurs wings. To do that, “We attract experts, innovators, and specialists in the field of social entrepreneurship, investment, business, poverty eradication, engineering, health, and the civil sector to mentor them.”
Catapult is excited to join that line up, spending three days with the entrepreneurs and running a short workshop series on prototyping. With the entrepreneurs we’ll walk through methods of rapidly testing out ideas both physically and experientially.
Follow the Unreasonable Institute’s progress through their recently launched “Unreasonable TV Episodes.”
This year we kicked off CataCAMP, our first staff training program, out on the Navajo Reservation in Northern Arizona. The objectives of CataCAMP are simple: build our staff’s field experience, create and share a public library of design workshops based on a year of project experience, and allow each member of our multi-disciplinary to teach the rest of us their skills and viewpoints.
Catapult’s work is as heavily rooted in cultural observation and research as it is design and technology. From the moment Tyler and I started this organization, we knew we would have to build a team of “engineering anthropologists” – talented folks who can bridge the technology world with the needs of people in a culture completely outside their own. We focused this year’s training primarily on cultural research methods. In order to practice these skills in real-time, we wanted to immerse the team in a foreign, unfamiliar culture. Why the Navajo Reservation? Catapult serves impoverished communities, and the Native American population is the most poverty-stricken community within the United States. More than half of the Navajo Nation residents live below the poverty level. Yet they have culturally rich lives with many still practicing and preserving traditional ways.
CataCAMPers with Bessie from our host family.
Our Catapult team – comprised of backgrounds in product design, mechanical engineering, anthropology, international relations, user experience design, and marketing and advertising – spent eight days living on the reservation absorbing the culture, visiting tribal entities, engaging with a host family, and conducting a series of workshops.
The first few days were spent outside Sawmill, AZ at a summer sheep camp with the Begay family, our generous hosts. We pitched our tents outside their hogan (the traditional, octagonal Navajo home) and spent three days observing their lives and hearing their stories. We also spent time with the Indian Health Service in Chinle, AZ, interviewing doctors on the health and environmental challenges that the Navajo community faces. We devoted an entire day to the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, the tribal entity responsible for electrification efforts on the reservation, visiting remote families with off-grid power solutions. We finished our trip with a series of cultural events and attended the “Sheep is Life” festival in Tsaile, observed the beginning of an Enemy Way ceremony, visited the infamous flea market and local artisans in Gallup, NM, and hiked to Canyon de Chelly’s White House Ruins.
In the field with the NTUA.
Over the next few weeks, we will release our stories and publish our workshops in a blog series devoted to CataCAMP’s results. Each attendee designed two workshops prior to CataCAMP and had 60 minutes to deliver it to the group and 30 minutes to collect feedback. The revised workshops are being published as part of Catapult’s desire to contribute to the social impact design knowledge space. Every day we receive emails from people interested in our work, and who want to know how to do what we do. Without the ability to hire people, this is the next best thing we can offer – workshops for anyone and everyone to download, experiment with, and use to build their own internal research methods and understanding of the design process.
We welcome feedback and ideas from the public! And finally, we want to thank our generous hosts for inviting our team into their homes and for leaving us with a memorable and enriching experience.
Investors and potential investors in Africa gathered in Dar es Salaam in early May for the World Economic Forum on Africa. Joining the forum were African government officials representing nearly every African nation, finance investors from China, India, the US and Europe, as well as non-profits, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs. In the opening session, Tanzanian President Kikwete expressed his desire to propel agricultural growth, but the hot topics also included multinational investment in Africa, energy infrastructure, women entrepreneurship, and building social leaders. The rallying cry: let’s stop talking about Africa’s “potential” and start building successful case studies.
The World Economic Forum tagline is “Committed to improving the state of the world.” To me that requires tackling big issues like poverty and inequality through environmentally sustainable development. The driving factors to achieving environmental sustainability? The use and design of technology. Empowering women. Supporting local innovation.
I was privileged to speak with a few individuals addressing these issues in Africa as policy makers, entrepreneurs, and non-profit organizations. I asked each of them, “Tell me about innovation, design, women and/or technology in Africa.” Here are some of their responses.
Co-founder and Managing Director of Kickstart, a non-profit organization developing and marketing new technologies that are bought by local entrepreneurs and used to establish new small businesses.
“Very little work, in terms of design, innovation, technology in Africa, is being done for the people at the very bottom of the economic pyramid. It’s generally assumed that somehow or another miniaturized or minimalized version of high-tech developed for wealthy economies will somehow trickle down to bottom the pyramid. I think that’s totally the wrong approach. Because these consumers are in such a different set of social, economic and emotional circumstances that they require technology solutions to be developed specifically to meet those circumstances. And so it’s a completely different field. Going further, it’s probably more true that we can upscale small or low-tech solutions we develop for the BOP so that they have the potential for trickling down into wealthy economies.”
CEO of Technoserve, a non-profit providing business advice and access to both markets and capital to businesspeople in developing countries.
“I think increasing opportunity for women in business, intersecting that with technology, as well as increasing possibilities in distribution, and diffusion of innovation, not just for women, but all entrepreneurs, is necessary. To attempt this years ago – to have the design tools and finance for business – was too costly. And so the developing world always ended up as a recipient. But now we’re building a middle class, the most rapidly growing consumer sector, which creates a strong market for products. This is the best opportunity for development.”
Acumen Fund Fellow working with d.Light, a low-cost solar lantern company providing lighting to families in developing countries.
“Africa’s challenges do not exist in silos: the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, for instance, is a function of culture, history, and economy as well as a dozen other factors. Challenges such as these require holistic solutions which integrate the on-the-ground-reality faced by the continent. I believe that the confluence of human centered design and modern technology is the most powerful tool the world has for generating the innovative solutions required to overcome these challenges.”
Project Director of The Clean Energy Company, building sustainable wind power solutions in Mozambique.
“There is this concept of African innovation which you see, especially in Mozambique, every time you go to a garage. I’ll see a piece of equipment, welding machines, bits of metal and wound wire and it blows me away sometimes. But innovation always comes from a specific need that’s inherent and if you bring that need from outside then it gets too convoluted in the way it’s translated. It almost has to happen itself over time. So in terms of bringing innovation and new design concepts, it takes time on the ground to see how things work and you have to adapt what you’re bringing to the African innovation process.”
