Sometimes, technology is complicated and caters to small privileged niche markets. But not all endeavors follow such pattern. Let’s explore a few projects that aim to help the world population in a meaningful and potent way.

Evaporative cooling to improve vegetable storage in rural areas

Across the Sahel in Africa, many small farmers, market vendors, and families lack an affordable and efficient solutions for storing and preserving vegetables. Therefore, harvested vegetables are at risk of spoiling before they can be sold or consumed.

Such translate into a loss of income for farmers and vendors, a lower availability of nutritious foods for local communities, as well as an increase in the time spent traveling to purchase fresh produce. The matter is particularly pronounced in remote areas, and for individuals facing financial or technological barriers to refrigeration.

A report named “Evaporative Cooling Technologies for Improved Vegetable Storage in Mali” from MIT’s Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE) and MIT D-Lab, suggests there are low-cost, low-tech solutions for communities needing produce refrigeration that rely on an old method utilizing the air-cooling properties of water evaporation.

“Build your own Zero Energy Cooling Chamber (ZECC)” by World Vegetable Center, YouTube.

Produced from simple materials such as bricks or clay pots, burlap sack or straw, such devices can potentially address many of the challenges that rural households and farmers face. More specifically, chambers cool vegetables via the evaporation of water, in the same fashion that the evaporation of perspiration cools the human body. When water (or perspiration for that matter) evaporates, it takes the heat with it. In less humid climates like Mali, where it is both hot and dry, technologies that take utilize such cooling framework show much promise for efficiently preserving vegetables.

HIV detection via mobile phone

Traditional HIV virus monitoring methods can be expensive, requiring the use of polymerase chain reaction (PCR). This holds especially true for at-risk populations in different parts of the world with less access to healthcare.

A team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, aimed to design an affordable, simple tool that makes HIV testing and monitoring easier for individuals in developing nations.

Using nanotechnology, a microchip, a mobile phone and a 3-D-printed phone attachment, the researchers created a platform that can detect the RNA nucleic acids of the virus from a single drop of blood. The device detects the amplified HIV nucleic acids via on-phone monitoring of the motion of DNA-engineered beads without using large or expensive equipment. The detection precision was evaluated for both specificity and sensitivity.

Researchers concluded that the platform enabled the detection of HIV with 99.1 percent specificity and 94.6 percent sensitivity at a clinically relevant threshold value of 1,000 virus particles/ml (with results within one hour). It’s important to note that the total material cost of the microchip, phone attachment and reagents was less than $5 per test.

A social network for small farming communities

Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Wefarm provides more than a million East African smallholders in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania with a social media platform to share farming savoir faire.

Last year, the organization launched the monthly Champion Farmer initiative to reward farmers who “are individually driving forward Uganda’s agricultural productivity via information sharing”.

Wefarm sent an SMS invitation to about 25,000 Ugandan farmers inviting them to enter the challenge, of which 695 participated answering questions from farmers around the country on the price of maize, the causes of yellowing leaves, best fertilizers and space allocation among other things.

“WeFarm SMS based farming model launched in Nakuru (Kenya)” by KBC Channel 1, YouTube.

Sometimes, “simple tech” can translate into efficient and scalable solutions. We should encourage such initiatives since they potentially help a vast number of individuals in need.