A crash course in changing the world.
What Ethan Zuckerman says about the limitations of solar cookers is true but….
If people stir their stews and thus can’t really use solar cookers (I’m not sure he’s actually confirmed this suspicion in reality), they can still use them to bake potatoes or cook plain rice, neither of which require stirring. Solar cookers can also be used to boil water.
According to what I’ve seen from how people use simple solar cookers in African refugee camps, solar cookers are used in conjunction with hotboxes, an insulated container into which the solar-heated pot is put to keep on cooking. You can see the process at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1U2ILREJqk
The hotbox is an old technology, a traditional technology that was used by American settlers and European natives probably for centuries. It adapts very well to solar cookers.
All my 30 years of experience with small-scale solar is available in video form at
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2009/09/simple-solar-parts-1-2-and-3.html
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2009/12/simple-solar-parts-4-through-8...
Secondarily, the bicycle is one of the most efficient machines people have invented and is wonderful platform for development. In Nairobi, Pascal Katana is developing a bicycle charger for cell phones. A bicycle generator can not only provide light for riding at night but also charge batteries for a variety of devices during the day. We should remember the bicycle transport systems used during the Vietnamese/American war where probably millions of tons of equipment was transported thousands of miles using bicycle trails through the jungle. Can such bicycle transport systems augment or replace some trucking and paved highways? There are bicycle threshers for millet and sorghum that I've seen at the International Development Design Summit too. The bicycle is an incredible tool that is still under-utilized.
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