Today I visited
Carmatech, the Centre for Agricultural Mechanisation and Rural Technology in Arusha Tanzania. Carmatech is a public institution that’s working on developing appropriate rural agricultural technology for Tanzanians. We collaborate with them on the Africa Biogas Partnership Programme and they’re pretty famous in the African biogas sector for design modifications that they introduced to the current biodigester that brought down costs by at least thirty percent! They've also done some pretty cool things like come up with e.g. a solid state biodigestor that can be used by pastoralist and agro-pastroralist communities with no water (other than cow urine) needed to feed the digestors. They're also the legends that came up with the idea of paying people money to use the bio-latrines in Mwanza.
During my meetings with them, I was pretty jazzed to meet Noela. She’s a mechanical engineer who in her words “wants to put a women’s perspective in every machine’ that comes out of Carmatech. While (ostensibly) a design conversation, it was utterly refreshing to see how she has infused feminism into her work even without necessarily using the word. Her remit is to, amongst others work with user communities on
Creative Capacity Building. This is where she sits with groups of men and women who are struggling with some challenge and they come up with a product that’s designed to resolve this challenge. The criterion that she uses is that the product must reduce either energy or time spent doing a particular chore for it to qualify as a successful design. She walked me through some of the groups that she’s worked with- where women come in ‘scared of hammers and nails’ and by making them create a product, she now has groups of women who are now using these as part of their daily tools.
She also explained how when working with women, she’s seen how they move from how they frame problems and seeing challenges that they face (e.g. long periods of time spent fetching firewood, or water) from being what they consider a ‘woman’s lot’ to a problem that deserves tackling. And this happens because the women have unlocked the radical idea that problems that affect women are worth solving and not to be endured. Pretty radical stuff. She told me of how hard it is in the beginning to tease out from women what challenges (changamoto) they face and identify these as problems. Rather, they see the threshing of beans which requires that many women come together to beat the heck out of bags of beans with a stick for three days of more as something that threatens the marriage (too tired at night) than something that is a problem to them (they’re bloody knackered). However, by working with them, and co-creating solutions to challenges they face, many of the women that Noela works with are able to make this shift.
All the above reiterated to me just how change happens. It’s through people like Noela, who are determined to make women’s lot a whole lot easier. And she does this one women, and one machine at a time.
