Food Processing: Ghanaian Vignettes Continued

Please excuse the off format: post by email is neither fancy nor frequent. Continuation below.

Photo captions: 

1. Somewhere near the Central Market in Kumasi

2. *View from a public tro tro. These taxi-like micro busses got their name for the local word for "three," which is how many pence you needed to catch a ride back in the British colonial era. 

3.A first-pass test of the tumbling idea for cassava peeling. 

4.With only a paltry amount of peel removed, this concept still has some tinkering to go. 

The people here are anything but shy: our group of 7 westerners is constantly drawing banter, handshakes, and curious looks as we weave through the bustling marketplace, interrogating buyers and sellers alike with our odd questions. With our taxi-hailing and tro-tro* hopping skills on the up and up, we've also established a presence across town at a machine shop run by our colleagues from KNUST. 

With the help of a wise gentleman named  Crossman (who, despite his name, is infectiously jovial) and his accommodating crew of machinists, the team threw themselves into some quick and dirty prototyping of cassava peeling devices. The shop is found in a sort of tinkerer's district called Suami Magazine, a sprawling expanse of myriad gadgets, car parts, and hardware deserving of it's own post and better pictures than I possess. With these resources at their disposal, the team got some quick data on its peeling concepts. Different grating, slicing, and grinding surfaces were tried, showing potential for combination into a multi function cassava processing machine. A simple grating-tumbler concept came together in a hurry, but reminded us with a feeble first test that not all progress looks like success. Rather than fabricate a shaft and bearing, we clamped the entire cylindrical chamber into the shop's mill to try some slow rotating trials. 

Given the prevalence of cassava as a staple food and the lack of fast peeling implements on the market, the team sees serious economic impact for a broad market if they can hash out some simple but apparently tricky technical issues.

Though there's much more to  write about, you probably won't hear from us for a couple days: team Ghana is headed (even more) off the grid to the local villages. In the small, tightly knit communities with the fewest resources and the most to gain from our work, we're sure to take some eye opening steps towards piecing together an appropriate and replicable business model to include our device-in-progress.

Look for more when we check back in from the villages on Friday.