Monday, January 27, 2020

Food Processing - January 2020 Update

We are happy to be sharing updates about what we have been doing from the beginning of the 2019 spring semester until now!

Our main updates revolve around the grater. We made significant progress on a more sustainable grater design necessary for QueenTech to grow and support operations on earned revenue from sales. Since the spring of 2019, the technical team made the decision to re-evaluate different architectures for the grater and settled on a simpler design that cantilevers the head directly on the motor shaft. By switching, the team was able to reduce the number of components, price, and maintenance required.

The newest version of the grater.
We were also able to work with a supplier in China to provide a motor that meets our design specifications necessary to move forward with production. On our most recent trip, we delivered a small batch of these motors to QueenTech for testing and sales. This upcoming semester, we plan to order a larger batch to significantly increase grater production! These outcomes were made possible by a generous grant from The Dow Chemical Company received last fall.

We brought on a new employee to QueenTech, Nana Yaa, who has been working with us for many years and accepted her offer at the end of the most recent trip. Her experience and expertise will be extremely valuable to QueenTech as it begins to grow. We are incredibly excited to have her officially on the team! On the most recent trip, she was able to put her thesis experience to work prototyping new heads for processing banku, another Ghanaian staple food, which could create new possibilites for women processors in addition to gari.

Ben with Nana Yaa accepting her offer.
2019 was an incredible year for QueenTech, and as we begin the new decade, the future of small scale food processing is bright! We'll keep you posted as best we can.

The 2019 Team: Debbie, Nana Yaa, Boakye, Francis, Ben, Claire, Colvin, Maggie, Lucas, John, Diego, Herve, Hanna, Rebecca, Lujain, Radia, and Nathan

The end of a successful trip!

Thursday, January 24, 2019

Food Processing - Community Visits


It's hard to know what to expect when checking in on the status of our customers and machines in the field–there can be failures both mechanical and in communication. But seeing these situations first-hand is vital to QueenTech’s development since it exposes details about our machines and operations that we could never have anticipated. As time goes on, we establish clearer business practices and our machines stay in the field longer. We went into the field this weekend ready to learn as much as we could from our observations, and to apply that knowledge to future work.
Naomi, our newest customer with her newly purchased grater and press
Our first stop was the delivery of machines to our newest customer, Naomi. Womentum provided funding to set her up with a grater and press from us as well as a stove from Burro to jumpstart her gari-making business. Another woman in her village had already been processing cassava for a few months using QueenTech's equipment, so Naomi was familiar with it. While we set up her new machines and talked to her about the funding she was receiving, some members of our team addressed issues our established customer was having with her press. We knew that the nuts on our press had to be frequently replaced, because the fine dust in the air would strip the threads after many uses. In our previous design, the nuts were welded to the handles that tighten the press. We recently reimagined the nuts to be removable from the handle, however, so that only the nut, and not the whole handle, would need replacement. When our established user on Saturday showed us that her handles had stripped, we cleaned the lead screws on her press and replaced the handles with our new design. Now she will be able to simply buy new nuts if they strip again, rather than waiting for us to deliver her entirely new handles.
Debbie, Chief Executive of QueenTech, demonstrating to our new customer how to use the press
Our next stop was to pick up a press prototype that was being testing by one of our long-term users, Adjoa. This press used a locking bar rather than a lead screw on one side, which cut much of the cost of lead screws and frequent nut replacements. However, we learned from this and other users that once most of the liquid was pressed out of a bag of cassava, this press design was unable to apply enough pressure on its locking bar side to evenly squeeze out the remaining moisture. Because of this, we decided in the semester before our trip that we wouldn't move forward with the design.

The team, Akosua, and Kingsford
 After stopping for a quick grater inspection in a nearby village, we concluded our user visits for the day at the home of a longtime user (and champion prototype tester), Akosua, and her husband, Kingsford. There, arranged carefully in the yard, were four versions of our press from different stages of its development. The first was a tall, sturdy table with lead screws that folded down. “We like this one best,” said the husband, smiling, “because it’s so big.” We’ve found that size is a recurring theme working on machines in rural areas—people care a lot about durability because if something goes wrong, it can take time to get out there and fix it, and they also want to be able to produce a lot of product when the raw material is available. We took off the pressing boards and compared them with those of the newest press design, revealing that the new ones were actually slightly larger. But we were reminded that this model had longer lead screws for more capacity, plus one more difference: 
Four of our press designs that Akosua has been testing over the years
“It's the legs,” our user’s husband said. There was no arguing with this; the old design had four long, solid legs, while the newest one only had two with feet that spread out at the bottom. We’d never seen any issues related to the strength of these legs, but the perception of size and strength was an important factor that our users mentioned over and over. It didn't matter that the newest design could hold more cassava; it looked smaller so was less preferred. “And it doesn't press as well on the side with the bar,” said our user’s husband. This wasn't news, but it supported the decision we’d made to move away from that iteration. It was a very clever design that past team members had put hard work into, so we were sad to see it go, but glad to come away from our field testing with valuable lessons that informed the direction of our future design work. 
The four-legged press from years past
For years, our team has met with the chiefs of communities we wanted to work with—this is a required practice that helps keep unwanted influences from bringing chaos and corrupting local ways of life. Over time, this has become unnecessary, and we are truly grateful for this trust and the opportunity to learn—about  building machines, about conducting business, and the many ways that people live in the world.

Sunday, January 20, 2019

Food Processing - Preparation


Meeting Debbie was one of our first priorities upon arriving in Kumasi. We came down to the guest house lobby on Thursday morning to find her smiling and looking impeccably ”smart,” as Ghanaians would say, in stark contrast to ourselves, who hadn't quite adjusted to the heat and early mornings of Ghana. Debbie showed us around Kumasi’s Central Market, a place where you can buy anything and people move like liquid in quick, thin currents. We weaved among canyon-like aisles of fabric and food vendors calling out to everyone passing by. That evening, we shared a delicious Ghanaian meal (if you haven't had Ghanaian food, seek some out!) in preparation for the first dayof work.
Suame Magazine is a treasure trove of mechanical artifacts salvaged from every machine imaginable. It seems like we’ve set up right in the middle of it all, but in fact we’re on the edge; Suame is the one of the largest manufacturing districts in west Africa, if not the largest. We spent Friday working in ITTU, a KNUST machine shop where Debbie and the Ghana team fabricate QueenTech’s products. Over the weekend we would be going on a number of community visits which would require us to have a variety of spare parts and tools for field repairs. We also needed to build a brand new cassava grater and press to sell to a first-time customer on the trip. Although Debbie and the Ghana team had already completed the structural components of the grater and press, we had a full day of mounting hardware and quality-checking the machines to get them ready for our customers, the women that are at the heart of this venture. 

Debbie, Chief Executive of QueenTech
Each sale of a machine is exciting progress for QueenTech because it immediately allows for greater independence and convenience in a woman’s often grueling cassava-processing routine. They go through this strenuous process to produce a product called “gari,” highly valued for its 6-month shelf-stability, which helps to provide reliable food and income to many people who have neither. First, they peel the woody bark off of the root and cut it into pieces, which they do quickly and effectively with only a large knife. They then grate the root, which involves bending over a sharp grating sheet for hours. Next, the ground root is left in a press to ferment and is finally dried into the final value-added product. Pressing typically requires either carrying the cassava to and from a presser, who charges for the service, or enlisting male friends or relatives to lift large, heavy rocks onto the bag of cassava. 

Claire, a new team member
 QueenTech’s products address the most burdensome parts of the process, so they have a drastic impact on women’s profits and the level of control they have over their businesses. These impacts have been recognized by platforms like Womentum, a nonprofit that funds women entrepreneurs, which funded our newest customer’s machines.
Honoring the commitment of Womentum’s generous donors (and us to our users) required our team to figure out how to weld even after the power went out during our workday on Friday--we loaded the machines into the trotro, carried them to the balcony of our guest house, and completed their assembly using the only working outlet we could find. Our customer’s grater may have processed its first cassava in a guest house bathtub, but we’re confident that it will be running in the field for years to come!

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Ghana Child Education Team- Ghana STEM Network and Teacher Interview #3

CHILD EDUCATION TEAM - GHANA

Our team consists of Emma, Apurva, Viktor, Stan, and Mikayla.


DAY EIGHT |  THUR JAN 17th 2019  |  ACCRA, GHANA


In the morning we attended a meeting of the Ghana STEM Network alongside Connie, our trip leader and founder of the Exploratory, and the Exploratory’s program manager, Favour. The meeting was hosted by the Ghana Education Services to bring the Ghana STEM Network together to share their work. At the meeting, all attendees presented about their work, which was a great opportunity for us to learn about STEM education here and get into contact with those leading the efforts to make STEM education more practical and hands-on. We were also able to demo the different versions of the Brightbox, answer [questions, and receive feedback from other attendees. Everyone seemed really excited about the potential of the Brightbox in Ghana and many of those in attendance were also educators. It was very encouraging for us to see their enthusiasm for the Brightbox since they had so much knowledge and experience working in Ghana.

We were also able to meet Charles Ofuri, who created The Science Set (a low-cost, portable science lab) who had a lot of expertise with materials and manufacturing in Ghana. He helped us identify a material called strawboard as a sturdier alternative to corrugated cardboard that is easy to get in Ghana. He also helped us identify that we wanted to investigate printing presses and die-cutting here.

Students from our team discussing the Brightbox with 
members of the Ghana STEM Network

We also did another round of testing with teachers in the afternoon, this time focusing on a comparison between the MDF, cardboard, and paper boxes. We received a lot of very helpful feedback from our teachers and a lot of information about how our boxes can be used to better integrate their science and BDT (Building, Design, and Technology) classes.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Food Processing - Arrival


Five days ago our group of ten Olin and Babson students and our trip leaders arrived at the airport in Accra, Ghana. We’re all here to work on ventures supported by the Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship program, a joint class between Olin and Babson in which students strive to identify and address real problems faced by limited income groups. The two teams represented in Ghana are the Child Education team, which is developing educational tools to increase student and teacher engagement; and our team, Food Processing.
 
Our team left Accra on Wednesday in a bus to Kumasi, the home of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and our most vital member, Deborah Opandoh. Debbie is the Chief Executive of QueenTech, a startup formed by this project that creates small-scale cassava graters and presses for local women. These tools are used by women to grow their small cassava-processing businesses independently from men, who are usually the owners of larger graters and presses which women must pay to use. QueenTech offers micro loans so that its personal machines are affordable to women up front; the women can then use the increased profits they gain from faster and easier cassava processing to pay off the machines in under a year. In this way, women gain control of their own businesses, begin a path of upward mobility, and devote less time and physical strain to cassava processing work.

ADE Food Processing has been working with Debbie on QueenTech for years throughout the many phases of its development. On this trip, we’re hoping to check the status of the machines that have already been put to use, speak with their users, and implement some of the product and venture changes that we’ve developed back in Boston over the past semester. This will give Debbie and the rest of our team the vital information we need to make decisions about the direction of the startup and the work we do in future semesters.

In the next few days, we’ll be reporting back on community visits, fabrication and design work, and the insights we gain from our interactions with team members who we only have the chance to meet in person a few times each year. Like our facebook page to stay tuned! If you want to help QueenTech grow and thrive, you can donate to our crowdfunding campaign!

Monday, January 14, 2019