James Pimundu and team from Send a Cow Rwanda in Rwanda will test whether educating men and women in Rwanda on gender barriers and social behavior issues stimulates them to use energy-saving stoves for cooking. Although affordable energy-saving stoves are available, they are not widely adopted, possibly because women have limited access to money and lack the power to make decisions. They will train both men and women to inform them of gender barriers in order to reduce inequality. By promoting better technology uptake in this way they aim to substantially reduce the time and labor costs of collecting firewood, as well as empowering the women to take control of other important family issues such as health and child care.

Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu of the Smallholders Foundation in Nigeria will improve his Box-in-a-Truck design for extending the lifespan of cassava, which is a major staple food grown by women smallholder farmers, to decrease labor costs associated with cassava processing. Cassava spoils within 24 hours of harvesting, and the traditional method of prolonging life by leaving the crops longer in the ground reduces the nutritional content. He has designed a small, manually transportable truck containing a wire box that is surrounded by moist sawdust and can hold 145 pieces of cassava. This Box in a Truck is inexpensive and can be locally manufactured and maintained. Initial tests showed that cassava stored in this way lasted the duration of the 16 day study period and retained more nutrients than when it is left in the ground. He will test extended time spans and optimize parameters for use, and then field-test the device for its capacity to save labor and its suitability for local conditions across different seasons using 200 women smallholder farmers.

Donna Cohn and colleagues from Hampshire College in the U.S. will develop a cheap and simple threshing machine to more easily and carefully process pearl millet, which is a highly nutritious staple cereal grown in sub-Saharan Africa. To extract the edible grains, pearl millet is currently processed by hand, which is labor-intensive and highly inefficient, causing substantial reductions in yield. They will refine their thresher design, including producing variations for powering it, and field-test prototypes in Ghana for performance. This will drive further refinements to generate a final design, for which production costs will be determined.

Sara Delaney of Episcopal Relief & Development in the U.S. and Ghanaian colleagues will promote the use of donkeys with ploughs for draught power to decrease labor and increase productivity of women smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Traditionally, oxen are used as draught animals but they are often unavailable to women due to cost, gender and cultural issues, and their large size makes them difficult for women to handle. The donkey ploughs are suitable for weeding and preparing land for a variety of crops, and can be locally manufactured and maintained. The Ghanaian team will run training workshops in northern Ghana for women smallholder farmers currently using hand tools, and provide two affordable financing options for them to purchase the donkey, plough, and cart. Performance, financial aspects, and the level of adoption will then be evaluated.