TU Delft Global Initiative

☀️💧Salamu kutoka Kisumu!💧☀️

As of Sunday evening, the Nyarobe team is working and researching in Kisumu, a relatively big city at Lake Victoria. Past Monday, Sophie and Charlotte had their very first focus group consisting of 25 participants! The focus group was a community living together and at the same time they were registered as a SACCO group, a group ensuring each other social financial security. We mostly gained deeper insights regarding our business model, the water regulation in Kisumu and the different marketing techniques used outside of Nairobi, in more rural areas.

Yesterday, the team traveled to Homa Bay to visit 4 different people from the target group. We found how vastly different the water supply is regulated. In Homa Bay, most people drink directly from Lake Victoria or from a borehole. Buying bottled water is very unusual, which offers us a challenge to see whether our water filter could be designed in a way that it can make fresh water, water from Lake Victoria, clean and healthty.

This is the last update from the Nyarobe team in Kenya. For questions or more information, make sure to follow our Instagram: nyarobe_waterfiltration and reach out to us!👋👋

Kwaheri, team Nyarobe

Salamu kutoka Nairobi!🌤☔️

The Nyarobe team has been researching in sunny, sometimes rainy, Kenya for one and a half weeks already! The past few days, we've been conducting interviews with one of the biggest companies within water filtration in Sub Saharan Africa. We talked about how to launch a product in the, already quite saturated, Kenyan market.

Next to this, we visited the NGO Shofco in Kibera, Africa's biggest slum. Shofco aims to provide education and leadership development for women and girls and is present in 10 slums across Kenya. Shofco also owns several water kiosks within Kibera and is planning on scaling up further.

Next to busy Nairobi, we also spent one day in Narok, a relatively small and old city. In Narok, we also visited a water filtration company and we visited users from our target group. The goal was to find out how water is regulated outside of Nairobi and we found that it depends vastly on the location in what way the water is contaminated. Tomorrow we head out to Kisumu, a small city located next to Lake Victoria, to round up our user research.

For more info and updates follow Basic Water Needs and our instagram: nyarobe_waterfiltration.

CERTIFICATION OF MEDICAL DEVICE

Jambo!

Since I am in Nairobi, I can not wait to share with you what I have learnt about the certification process of medical devices! Recently, I have facilitated a focus group session with entrepreneurs from Nairobi to learn from their experience in certifying their medical devices. From the focus group session and other individual interviews, I learnt that the Kenyan Bureau of Standards (KEBS) plays a very large role in the certification process whereas, previously, I thought only the regulatory body of medical devices named the Pharmacy and Poisons Board (PPB) was the main actor. Medical devices that are intended for the Kenyan market need approval from both bodies. One of the pictures includes a typical KEBS sticker on the product that has been KEBS approved!

Until now, I discovered there are very few (to almost none) organisations that have managed to fully design, manufacture and certify medical devices locally in Kenya but these organisations are seeking a way to achieve this in order to boost Kenya’s economy and to allow medical devices to reach the market in a more effective and efficient way. It seems that obtaining certification locally in Kenya is possible in theory!

It is not necessarily that many organisations have failed to obtain certification locally but the type of approval such as CE-mark from Europe or the FDA from USA, grants access to a wider market. This is because these approvals are accepted in many places outside of their respective continents. For this reason, organisations currently may prefer these approvals however only those with large enough amount of financial resources can obtain it.

This was my last post, I hope you enjoyed reading what I have been up to in Kenya! Thanks to all the kind and helpful people in Kisumu and Nairobi, I was able to learn a lot about the topic! If there are any questions, feel free to contact me!

💧💧Habari zenu wote!💧💧

Last Wednesday, Meike, Femke and Mila arrived in sunny Nairobi and as of yesterday, Sophie and Charlotte joined the team in Kenya's capital city as well! We have settled ourselves in our house in Kilimani and yesterday we kicked off our first interview with users in Kenya! We visited Brian, the local Basic Water Needs employee, https://www.basicwaterneeds.com/. He introduced us to several water kiosks in his neighborhood and we learned about the different water filtration processes and what customers value when it comes to buying clean drinking water. A water kiosks is a small shop in which bottled water can be bought or at which you can fill up your own bottles or jerry cans.

Next to the different interviews with water kiosks, we also had our first user interview at the gated community 'Paradise Lost'. We took our prototype with us to show the participants and we learned about what these people usually need to do to get clean drinking water. This was quite an interesting visit, as one of the participants used to be an owner of a water kiosk herself and she was an expert on water filtration. We learned that trust plays a big role when it comes to buying behavior, especially when it comes to products that are related to health, like drinking water.

Next week, we plan on visiting several people in different areas of Nairobi. By interviewing all these people, we want to find out how to eventually market and price our product and how to make it fit exactly to the needs of our target group.

For more updates of our research under the African sun ☀️, follow us on our instagram: nyarobe_waterfiltration.

For more information and updates regarding Basic Water Needs, follow Basic Water Needs

Kwa heri!

AZHIM IN MBALE

I have decided on a specific focus for my project in Uganda and it is about “how to get women to safety in emergency flood situations”. The location that I will be basing my case study on is a village called Namabasa which suffers from bad floods almost yearly, and even now, flooding is already beginning to happen due to the rainy season. Women endure the hardest challenges during floods as they usually have less physical capability to traverse the strong water currents, increasing the high possibility of losing lives. With the collaboration of Uganda Red Cross Society and local social organizations, we will be designing an early warning system combined with a response strategy that hopefully is contextually relevant and implementable in the long run.