Aid Worker’s Rube Goldberg Device Powers Up a Continent

The Multipurpose Platform, with its belts and wheels and barrels, looks like some nonsensical contraption invented by Rube Goldberg. But it seems to work miracles in African villages.

The platform uses a single motor for lots of things: husking rice, milling grain, pumping water, generating electricity, pressing vegetable oil, sawing timber, charging batteries, running tools.

Its 8-horsepower Indian-built diesel motor can also run on oil from nuts of the pourghere, a Mexican plant long grown in Africa.

What’s more, according to its inventor, veteran Swiss aid worker Roman Imboden, it can energize a village, transforming economic and social structures.

Women run and manage the platform. They learn to read and do basic math, and they pay back the capital loan. Men buy electricity from them and distribute it to village compounds.

“Women suddenly have a place, and men learn to treat them as equals,” he said, over the insistent putt-putt of a platform in nearby Kotaka. “If you’re nice to your wife, you have light. But first, they mill their grain.”

Imboden, a bear of a man with a booming laugh, directs his project in Mopti with funds from the U.N. Industrial Development Organization, the U.N. Development Program and governments.

He demonstrates the machine to villages and helps interested cooperatives get a government-backed purchase loan. His staff helps with technical advice and maintenance.

The platform is no one’s gift, Imboden stresses. Villagers have to want it and work to pay for it. Within a few years, it generates new income and improves a village’s quality of life.

“This stops the sclerosis,” he said. “The village starts to dream. It is a pool of light at night, seen from far away, with new ways of looking at life. That starts to change a lot of things.”

Like others who pioneer such simple technology with management systems that defy traditional aid-giving, Imboden is often bogged down with writing reports to justify his project for doubters back in the home office.

But he remains convinced.

“At the village level, you don’t have to deregulate because everything is deregulated already,” he said. “Users make all the decisions. If we get enough of these going, people will take over our function by themselves.”

The platform is simply a parallel set of tracks, with the motor in the middle. Belts, pulleys and gears connect it to different devices.

For Imboden, what it represents is as important as what it does.

“This is one idea, not a solution,” he said. “But it is part of a tissue of mini-solutions which you sometimes can’t see from far away. What Africa needs now is this tissue of mini-solutions.”