We hopped out of the air-conditioned Landcruiser into the naked noontime sun, the unrelenting heat hitting us hard and with a quickness. The farm was about an acre and the farmers, Yonas and Amadi, slowly led a donkey in a circular pattern on top of their harvest, which was spread out over a burlap tarp in a small clearing. The crop was teff, a tiny wheat-like grain that is the principal ingredient in injera, the spongy flatbread that accompanies almost every meal in Ethiopia. My friend Muktar translated and I learned that after of the threshing (taking the edible part off the plant) was done, Yonas and Amadi thought they would collect about three-quarters of the grain they had spent three months cultivating. I had seen and heard the same thing on eight other farms in the Ethiopian countryside.
When I stopped in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s headquarters in Addis Ababa a few hours later to chat about what I had seen and heard, I wasn’t surprised to learn that post-harvest loss is a major problem. By some estimates, smallholder farmers, who make up about 70% of the world’s population living in extreme poverty, can lose anywhere from 25%-30% of their harvests during threshing and another 20%-30% due to poor storage. Not only were traditional methods inefficient, they often exposed the yield to dirt, small stones, and even animal feces. I met with the British director and the technical lead who was from Ethiopia; they both validated my observations and spoke passionately about the need for a low-cost, efficient and sanitary technology that could thresh multiple types of crops (teff, rice, corn, barley, sorghum). They believed that this would not only minimize post-harvest losses but also attract the next generation of farmers to stay in agriculture, perhaps as entrepreneurial service providers instead of as the same backbreaking field laborers their ancestors had been for generations. Thinking of that brutal sun, I nodded.
“You are from MIT,” they said, “can’t you and some of your students figure out a technology? If you do,” they continued, “we have the ability to procure and then distribute tens of thousands of that kind of a machine.” Immediately, some designs came to mind based on some of the other technologies I had seen over the years. Some of those technologies were able to be affordable, locally repairable, and environmentally responsible because they were pedal-powered, so most of the ideas I had immediately invoked that type of a machine. By the time the meeting wrapped up and I had gotten back in the air-conditioned vehicle, I had 3 sketches. As we drove to the airport I thought to myself, “I wish I had more time to talk to more farmers and to show them these ideas.” I pushed the thought out of my mind—I had spoken to several farmers and the two professionals I just met, both with decades more experience than me, had also validated this direction and guaranteed a market. What could go wrong?
Looking back, I’m embarrassed to say that I did return to MIT, put the project directly into a class, and mentored a group of students over the next year before realizing through field trials that farmers didn’t want a human-powered thresher. In that hot sun, they much preferred something faster that had an engine, and they also didn’t want their own threshers because they only needed them for roughly 15 days a year. The envisioned agricultural service provider? They definitely didn’t want something pedal- or treadle-powered; they wanted something fast and much cooler. Here, my students and I learned hard lessons about the dangers of assuming that affordability is the highest priority when designing technologies for low-income markets—that somehow the values of performance, durability and human aspiration don’t apply like they do in every other market. Did we fully understand the scope of the problem and who would be affected by a “solution.” Not in the least. Were we—in our air-conditioned vehicles and classrooms—the best positioned to address this problem? Not in the uninformed and self-assured way we were working. Did we predict that 5 years later the human-powered multi-crop thresher project would evolve into a company that uses a motorcycle to carry a diesel-powered machine into fields across Tanzania? Not at all.
