After 35 years creating innovative tools to fight global poverty, Compatible Technology International is now borrowing some insight from University of Minnesota engineering students.
Daniel Ross, Robert Belar, Elizabeth Vertina, Luke Bromback, Kevin Reddy and Ethan Brownell are teaming up to design a device that will help farmers in Malawi extract oil from peanuts and improve their income stream through efficient labor.
The St. Paul-based nonprofit has already developed a variety of tools to help farmers cultivate peanuts, or groundnuts as they are commonly referred to, in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent developments have included a lifter that gently pulls plants away from the ground to be easily gathered, a stripper that separates pods from roots, and a sheller that can easily shell whole nuts.
The production of groundnuts represents 25 percent of Malawi's agricultural income, but the dependence on manual labor is a major barrier to producing and marketing farmers' crops. Throughout most of Africa, groundnuts are cultivated on small plots of land without any kind of agricultural machinery. Even simple technological advancements can make harvesting groundnuts faster.
Alexandra Spieldoch, CTI executive director, said demand in the African peanut oil market is expected to increase from the rising price of other vegetable oils. If farmers can produce local, quality oil, they can sell to African buyers and processing companies, increasing their revenue and strengthening the Malawian economy. The oil can also be converted into peanut butter, an ingredient that improves food security and nutrition among the rural poor in Malawi.
Farmers in Africa can directly purchase the machines, which range from $50 to $280. "These have to be cheap. We're dealing with people where their hourly income is 25 cents or less an hour," said Don Jacobsen, CTI volunteer and mentor for the students. The challenge for the students was to create a project with materials that could be locally sourced for a minimal price, while also running without electricity or gas engines.
Over the past several years, CTI has done engineering projects with the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, University of St. Thomas and other Minnesota colleges. "We give them skunkworks projects to work on and develop prototypes or concepts that we can develop into a prototype," Jacobson said.
The company's latest project at the U had two main components. "One is to actually do this design project and fulfill the requirements that we're given by our mentors. The other component is to make sure that everything is well-documented," Vertina said.
