Life-saving designs: a little smart thinking is leading to products that are changing millions of lives

07 Jan 2014

A cooler cooler: Global Good's passive vaccine storage device

Christian Weber

A cooler cooler: Global Good's passive vaccine storage device

Christian Weber


Let's take a minute to praise drip tape. You can find it at your local gardening centre -- thin, perforated plastic strips that deliver water directly to a plant's roots. Drip tape is one of the biggest advancements in farming of the past 80 years, radically reducing the water industrial farmers need and enabling our food supply to skyrocket. We take it for granted because, like many great designs, it is so simple and commonplace. But it depends on a pressurised water supply. Millions of farmers in the developing world, where drip irrigation is impossible, must carry water cans on their backs - it's painful, scarring labour.

But in 2009 a small design startup, Proximity, launched a gravity-fed drip system. It's much more than a huge PVC-canvas bag raised barely a metre off the ground. The design hinges on an innovative water filter that cleans out dirt and grit without sapping water pressure. Proximity's system cuts water usage in half, increases yields by a third and costs just £21. The device enables one woman to tend a larger plot by herself. Her children can thus go to school instead of attending to their farming. Thousands of farmers in Myanmar have bought them.

Contrast the success of the Proximity system with the disastrous PlayPump, a merry-go-round that pumped water while children played on it. By 2008, Roundabout Outdoor, a company with backing from the US government, had installed more than 1,000 of these £8,700 devices across Africa, often at the expense of existing wells.

Unfortunately, the maths suggested that kids would have to play 27 hours a day for the PlayPump to provide enough water for those it served. Today most of them lie fallow, rusting monuments to good intentions married with half-baked design.

Over the past few years, design has become a crucial tool in helping the developing world. And that makes sense. After all, designers aren't just obsessed with fashion and form -- they are trained to articulate people's needs and desires and to build devices we will actually use. In the developed world, that can mean creating a variety of products that solve even the tiniest daily inconvenience, rely on our abundant infrastructure and appeal to our relative wealth. But those conditions don't apply to the world's poorest. So if you're going to help the developing world, you can't just airlift in supplies we use in the rich world. You need to understand deeply how the people there live, then design things that make sense for their specific conditions.

This trend has its roots in the early 2000s, when business writer CK Prahalad challenged the then-dominant view of the world's poorest people as charity cases who would gratefully use anything they were given. Instead, Prahalad saw the developing world as an unaddressed consumer market filled with individuals making tough choices to satisfy their needs. A mother in India facing a trade-off between medicine and mobile-phone minutes is every bit a consumer -- but her dilemmas are profound, and thus the products aimed at her need to prove their worth unambiguously.

We can still be naïve about the many challenges involved in making a product succeed in the developing world. But designers in recent years have become more exacting about the delivery and sustainability of devices and services. What follows are some of the most inspiring projects in development, including a light for treating infant jaundice that offers treatment at just ten per cent of western costs, a flask that can deliver vaccines to the most remote places in the world and a cholera ward that stops infection from spreading simply by treating its own water. These are the kinds of innovations that can help people today -- and will lead to even better-designed solutions tomorrow. Tim Brown

Vaccine storage device
Unrefrigerated vaccines spoil a problem in remote regions where electricity is spotty. Global Good'sanswer: Use a super-efficient cooler that requires just two bags' worth of ice to stay cold for up to 50 days. Liz Stinson

A Constant Log

Spoiled vaccines don't necessarily look spoiled, which is why vaccine refrigerators in the west often log their temperature history. This one keeps track of how often the lid is opened, and records temperature and GPS data, which can be downloaded via USB or relayed via SMS.

Insulating Layers

Eight plastic ice-filled containers stack inside the cooler's body. These sit inside an aluminium bottle wrapped in sheets of the same foil-like insulation that shields satellites from extreme temperatures by reflecting heat. A vacuum seal helps keep the inner chamber cold.

Efficient Retrieval

Inside are vials for 300 inoculations loaded on to trays that come in interchangeable sizes to suit different vaccine configurations.

They're reachable through a 12cm opening: 95 per cent of hands can fit through it, but it's still small enough to limit warm air from flowing in quickly.

Farmer's Helper: Global Good's Mazzi milk jug

Christian Weber

Farmer's helper

In the west, dairy farmers are the first link in a hyper-efficient processing chain. In Kenya, they do everything themselves, from milking to carrying their wares to market. As a result, up to five per cent of the milk produced each year is lost to either spillage or spoilage -- a major economic drain. The biggest culprit is the jerry can most farmers use to carry milk. So Global Good created the Mazzi, a container designed to be just big enough to carry a day's output from the typical three-cow farm, about 9.5 litres. It will hit the market next year in eight African countries. Liz Stinson

How it works

A detachable funnel allows farmers to milk directly into the jug so there are no transfers. The ends of the Mazzi handle (on the back side) are pinched off, eliminating hollows that can shelter bacteria. The 18cm-wide mouth lets users reach inside to scrub thoroughly.

Lightsaver: D-Rev's brilliance jaundice lamp

Christian Weber

Jaundice kills hundreds of thousands of babies in India and the developing world heartbreaking, since it can be cured in a couple of days with a simple blue light. But photo-therapy devices don't last in settings where replacement bulbs and parts are in short supply. Working phototherapy units are rare as a result, so nonprofit product outfit D-Rev developed Brilliance, a unit that's cheap and robust. Kyle Vanhemert

Dependable bulbs

Hospitals in Nigeria and India often have photo-therapy units - but they're broken. Among the biggest culprits are compact fluorescent bulbs, which burn out after treating just 50 babies. Brilliance uses long-life LEDs, which can treat more than 1,000.

Fewer LEDs

LED models cost upwards of £1,800, thanks in part to their hundreds of diodes. For the Brilliance, D-Rev used computer modelling to optimise light coverage with just 12 LEDs. It sells for £250, yet it outperforms many state-of-the-art units.

Passive cooling

Most compact fluorescent phototherapy units include fans to cool the bulbs. Brilliance uses passive cooling - exposure to air - to regulate temperature, which in turn maximises LED performance. It's cheaper, and has one less breakable part.

A familiar look

D-Rev designed Brilliance with urban hospitals in mind, but it found that some doctors weren't likely to trust equipment that was too newfangled-looking. So the device is carefully crafted to look familiar and western.

Pleasure protector: Condax's air-infused female condom


Pleasurable protector

In the developing world, it's still often taboo for a woman to ask her partner to wear a condom, so their use remains rare, and female condoms are uncomfortable, impractical and noisy. So Mache Seibel and a team at Condax are developing a female condom with an irresistible selling point: pleasure. The Femex has a thumb pump attached to inflatable tubules that grasp the male tightly while stimulating the G-spot and clitoris. Mark Yarm

How it works

The thumb pump and air infusion, partly inspired by Nike Air patents, are strikingly effective. In tests, women overwhelmingly prefer it to normal condoms. The Femex can be inserted up to six

hours in advance - a big draw in regions where women are less empowered and unlikely to press for protection.

Waste zapper: Caltech's solar-powered toilet

Christian Weber

Waste zapper

Some 2.5 billion people more than a third of the world's population lack clean toilet facilities. Such poor sanitation causes diarrhoea, which kills 800,000 children each year. A Caltech team led by Michael Hoffmann, a professor of environmental science, is creating a new toilet to solve the problem. This design, which recently won a grant from the Gates Foundation, costs less than one penny per person per day to run, while requiring minimal maintenance. Mark Yarm


To minimise transport costs, the toilets are housed in shipping containers. Two units will be shipped to India for field-testing this month.


The toilet has to work in areas without electricity. But to be sustainable, it also needs a water-recycling pump. The requisite juice comes from solar panels, which also power the sterilisation process. To prevent theft, the assembly is cemented securely in place.

Water spray

In Southeast Asia, it's customary to throw used toilet paper in a bin to prevent pipes from clogging. The bin thus becomes a disease vector. These rooms reject toilet paper in favour of a purified-warm-water spray and blow-dryers.

Electrochemical treatment

Any remaining water is sterilised electrochemically and is ready for another flush within four hours. By that time, it's also clean enough to be used for irrigation - creating additional revenue for the toilet's manager on top of per-use fees.

Cholera killer

Haiti's massive earthquake in 2010 led to the deadliest cholera epidemic in recent history. Next year Gheskio, a healthcare provider, and MASS Design Group will complete Port-au-Prince's first permanent base for treating the disease. Temporary clinics can be disease vectors: truckers hauling away contaminated sewage often dump their loads along the road, re-fouling the groundwater.

Kyle VanHemert

How it works

To avoid dumping, all sewage is treated on-site: underground chambers filled with anaerobic bacteria digest 99 per cent of pathogens. Water is then chlorinated before it flows to an adjacent garden.