Research Stories

by Adelheid Fischer

It's a warm, sunny day at the House of Tricks near Arizona State University's main campus in Tempe. Scattered in the dappled shade of the restaurant's grounds are small tables decked in white linen. I lean back in my chair surrounded by the comforting hum of conversation and the click of silverware on porcelain plates. Now and again a soft breeze sets the leaves of the pecan trees overhead into a soft chatter.

I order my favorite dish. When the waiter delivers the plate, I stop to ponder the slab of grilled salmon, the sticky cake of fried polenta, the wreath of tossed greens. The bounty before me and the ease with which it arrives suddenly seem like a small miracle.

To the average homemaker in Ghana, it is just that.

For the past half hour, I have been listening to Nana Frimpong Afoakwa describe the rigors and perils of daily food preparation in his African homeland. Afoakwa is paramount chief of a region in southeastern Ghana. It includes Domeabra, his native village of some 10,000 people.

Afoakwa has traveled halfway around the world in hopes of finding a way to make the cooking of food safer and easier for the people in his country. He has come to the right place.

Housed on ASU's Polytechnic campus in Mesa is a social entrepreneurship program known as GlobalResolve. This university-wide group of faculty and students tackles public health and environmental problems in developing nations. In their pursuit of sustainable solutions, GlobalResolve members engage with a wide range of partners. They include international universities, governments, financial institutions, nongovernmental organizations–and village leaders such as Afoakwa.

In Domeabra, as in many villages throughout the developing world, food preparation is a double-fisted thief that gives life with one hand and then steals some of it back with another. Each day, for example, the village women strap their children on their backs and head into the outlying forests to gather firewood. Hauling fuel can take hours.

The daily grind of putting food on the table robs them of time they might spend operating a small business, learning to read, or resting from the hard labors of tilling and planting their fields. The overharvesting of wood also has contributed to soil erosion and the loss of biological riches in Ghana's coastal forests.

But food preparation doesn't just plunder the country's intellectual and biological capital. The struggle for sustenance can exact a heavy toll on the villagers' health. All too often, this most primal and trusted exchange between mother and child can kill.

It has become a worldwide crisis. The problem can be traced to solid cooking fuels such as wood, dung, coal, and crop residues. Burning them in close quarters concentrates such dangerous emissions as smoke, particulates, carbon monoxide and benzene.

According to estimates by the World Health Organization, each year indoor air pollution from cooking fires claims the lives of 1.6 million people in the developing world. Nearly two-thirds of these casualties are children. The problem is so severe that 20 percent of children under the age of five die of smoke-induced respiratory infections, particularly pneumonia. Also vulnerable are the women who care for them. They routinely succumb prematurely to lung diseases such as bronchitis and emphysema.

Together, Afoakwa and GlobalResolve members are developing a renewable, cheap and clean-burning cooking technology to help break this cycle of illness.

They are part of a growing number of engineers and designers around the world engaged in the field of appropriate technology. Their premise is simple. To be sustainable in the long term, new technologies must be attuned to the economic, cultural, and environmental conditions of users.

Designing appropriate technologies, even those that are rudimentary, is far more difficult than it appears. A lack of knowledge about local cultures and economies can doom even well-intentioned efforts.

Consider solar power as an example. Many people in the developed world think of Africa as uniformly hot, dry and sun-drenched. They argue that blanketing the continent with solar panels could supply Africa with a steady supply of the cheap, clean energy it so desperately lacks.

"But solar is tougher to make work effectively in the Third World than people generally realize," says Brad Rogers. He is director of research and development for GlobalResolve and a professor of engineering on the ASU Polytechnic campus.

"You need large solar collectors. These are difficult to maintain, easily damaged, and expensive. Besides, solar would not work well for the types of cooking they do in Ghana.

"Solar energy there is probably the lowest of any place in Africa, even though the country is near the equator," Rogers continues. "There are rainy seasons. And because of the smoke from cooking fires, 20 percent of the sun is blocked out. Already you are starting out with only 80 percent of the sun's available energy. In addition, north winds come down from the Sahara and bring dust that blocks the sun even more."

However, Ghana is blessed with rich soils and abundant rainfall. So the group settled on an agriculturally based solution: an ethanol-gel concentrate made from corn.

In 2007, GlobalResolve engineers whipped up a batch in the lab. Rogers led a group of students to Ghana to demonstrate the gel in action to Afoakwa and the women in his village.

"I jumped on it," Afoakwa says. "The gel is better and cleaner than the charcoal the women are using. And the women are not going to knock themselves out making it."

But to get households to adopt the gel fuel, GlobalResolve faced a series of tough hurdles. Chief among them is keeping costs low. Nearly everything about the production of the ethanol–from growing the raw materials to processing the fuel–has to be supplied using local resources, equipment, and labor. Any imported materials and technology can impose a hefty surcharge for transportation.

To make the gel fuel even more cost competitive, GlobalResolve engineers needed to find a way to find a way to stretch the gel's cooking power. So the team decided to design a super-efficient companion stove that could direct the fuel's BTUs into heating food rather than the surrounding air.

By fall 2007, the group had scraped together $32,000 in seed funding from the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), the Entrepreneurship at ASU initiative and private donors.

The ASU students spent one semester designing a distilling unit that could turn corn into ethanol. To create ethanol, plants such as corn and sugar are fermented. When boiled, the liquid travels up a distillation column and then condenses as pure alcohol. Chemical additives transform the fluid into the consistency of a gel that can safely power a small cooking stove.

By February 2008, GlobalResolve landed another grant from the NCIIA. The additional monies allowed the engineering team to buy materials and construct their design. After it successfully passed laboratory testing, the unit was disassembled and shipped to Domeabra. In August 2008, the GlobalResolve team stood by as the distiller was fired up for a trial run.

That same month, a grant from the ASU-based Women & Philanthropy Foundation allowed project engineers to return to the drawing board to create the stove design. Energy-efficiency was paramount, as was stability and safety. Ghanian women cook on the floor of their homes surrounded by children.

The stoves also had to be simple to operate. Materials and parts also had to be locally available in Ghana. And the stoves' technology needed to match the skill levels of the people who would manufacture and repair them. All this for a price point of $5.

In November 2008, the GlobalResolve team unveiled a prototype at the student union on the Polytechnic campus. In celebration, they treated passersby to samples of fufu, a Ghanian staple that is made with ground yams and cassava root.

But finding a sustainable economic model for the project was just as important as developing a sustainable cooking technology. From the start, the group favored developing a business case that was based on market dynamics rather than philanthropy. That's because too many worthy projects in the developing world have foundered due to donor fatigue or a change in the priorities of charitable foundations.

For help in drafting a solid business plan, the GlobalResolve team expanded its reach to include students and colleagues in business.

For example, Barrett, The Honors College at ASU, supported the travel of four honors business students to Ghana. Under the direction of James Hershauer, professor of management in the W.P. Carey School of Business, the students will craft a business plan for the distribution of the gel fuel.

Jennifer Bekki is an assistant professor of engineering on the Polytechnic campus. She is working with graduate students to model the project's entire supply chain. It includes everything from purchasing corn for the ethanol production and obtaining gelling enzymes from China to selling fuel on Ghana's city streets.

The project serves as a kind of silver bullet that can target a host of problems in the developing world. Not only would it improve human health and promote economic development, but the project also alleviates pressures on the environment. It also has potential payoffs in social development, especially for women.

"There's been broad recognition that the philanthropic model in dealing with challenges in the developing world has had limited success, or even worse, says Dan Killoren, GlobalResolve's program coordinator.

"The idea is to make this a self-sustaining project," he adds. "It's not a question of handing out stoves. It's about actually generating business on the local level."

Mark Henderson agrees. "The billions of poor in the world have needs," says Henderson, an engineering professor and executive director of the GlobalResolve group.

"They are a market that has been overlooked for a long time," he says. Just because they're poor doesn't mean that they aren't valuable customers. They do have the ability to buy certain things that specifically address their needs. A business can thrive if it addresses these needs."

GlobalResolve is supported by the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance, Entrepreneurship at ASU, and the ASU Women & Philanthropy Foundation. For more information about current projects, visit GlobalResolve's web site at: http://globalresolve.asu.edu/