Kopernik

Now that we have seen a little bit about life in western Kenya, let’s look at how the rural communities touched by the Q Drums fit in the bigger picture. Our project site, Matungu, located in the Kakamega county of Kenya’s western region and spanning 276 km², is one of the 290 electoral constituencies in Kenya. It's a mostly rural area, where the majority of the 147,000 residents live from subsistence farming (such as maize, sugar cane and potatoes) and raising animals. Salaried employment is hard to come by.

Our local partner, Yaya Education Trust, distributed 52 Q Drums in the 13 sub-locations within the Matungu district. Over the course of two weeks, we will be interviewing 30 of the families who have purchased Q Drums to see what impact they are having, and shed some light on why they are so oversubscribed!

On this very fine day, let’s hop on our motorbike (piki piki in the local language), meander a bit in sugar cane fields, and venture to the village of Harambee!

As a group of children walks past our home with their respective kid-sized buckets (some on their tiny heads!), we are reminded that it is about time for us to head to the spring to get some drinking water to go with dinner tonight. Let’s head out before the sun sets!

Nusa Penida is only a 45 minute boat ride from the beach town of Sanur, but in 23 years of living in Bali I had never ventured across to this exotic and magical island. All that changed last week, but there was no time to take in the jungle trekking or diving with mola-mola for which Nusa Penida is famous. My trip was about spreading the news of Kopernik’s life-changing technologies to the community in Desa Ped (Ped village).

Do you know how much water you use each day?

For those who have effortless access to crystal clear water just from a turn of the tap (or even motion detecting taps that spurt water before you have even mentally prepared yourself for the attack of the strong jet), this question is not of much importance. However, for some, accessing water is much less straight forward. Not only does each trip to the water source require a significant time commitment and physical effort, sanitary storage of collected water also requires careful consideration.

Greetings from Kenya! This is Denise, Kopernik’s Technology Monitoring Fellow, who is in the field right now so that you can follow, in the comfort of your own home, what is happening with the Q Drums and d.light solar lamps that were distributed in western Kenya in 2012 thanks to generous donations from all over the world.

Kopernik is a technology marketplace for the developing world. We have reached more than 90,000 people to date with life-changing technologies such as solar lights and water filters. The people benefitting from our technologies live in some of the most remote parts of the developing world, and have limited access to basic needs like electricity and safe drinking water. However, to our surprise, we have also received many enquiries from environmentally-conscious urban residents who would also like to buy our innovative, eco-friendly technologies.