A traditional Zimbabwe villager’s kitchen has no technology in it.
Victoria Falls / Two rural villages outside vic falls
In the villages people lead simple lives, often with limited access to fuel, water, and food. People are subsistence farmers living largely on corn mash with occasional vegetables and meat a couple times a month, perhaps. Life is hard here. Even basic technologies like electricity and on-demand fuel do not exist here.
High tech for an African homestead: this bio-digester turns cow poop into methane for cooking, so that young girls don’t have to forage for wood 2 hours each day.
We installed a bio-digester in one family’s home so they could produce methane gas for cooking from decomposing cow dung. This is a lifestyle-changer for them, because the young women in the family will typically spend hours a day scavenging firewood to cook, and then have to breathe tons of dirty smoke while they cook. In contrast to the simple living in the rural areas, more successful villagers may have a solar cell or two on their homestead for electric lighting and to charge cell phones. A phone may be shared among family or village members.
EcoCash, an e-banking service that requires only a basic call/text plan is big here – actually it was invented here. People’s plans typically provide phone+text services only. People are using their phones for money transfers, crop harvest information, and business. Weather forecasts are not used.
Some wealthier people own a nokia for reliability in the bush, and a smartphone for being connected in the city. It is a familiar story for people with poor connectivity. People wondered why there was not better data service in the bush.
I wondered why data services are so expensive, after seeing such low prices in Cambodia. Could internet services be cheap and ubiquitous? Whomever figures this out first will make a lot of money, and change the economy permanently.
I spent a while speaking to a young Zim woman who had a 2012 Nokia Windows phone and she lamented that the new phones are less reliable and harder to use than the old Nokia s40 devices. She missed the old Hardware buttons, durability and battery life of the candybar s60 or s40 nokias. She owns a windows phone and loves the good camera on it, but none of the key apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook were updated, so she felt left out. She wanted Android just to have current apps (FB, whatsapp, instagram) but didn’t want the OS software to change every year.
I suspect a beautifully designed, ruggedized, affordable android phone with good OS would go a long way here. There are ruggedized phones out there, but they are ugly, and usability of affordable Android phones is reportedly awful. A business opportunity for one of the big tech companies, perhaps?
