This Man Can't Stop Innovating
The genius of Moses Kizza Musaazi: He's an inventor, entrepreneur, fixer of things that are broken in the troubled country of Uganda.
Leigh Buchanan
SOLUTIONS PROVIDER: Moses Kizza Musaazi with one of his distinctive granaries. Schools use the granaries to store maize for students' lunches. Farmers store crops in them for when demand is high.
Nothing beats the economics and ingenuity of a great dual-use product. On a scorching February day, Moses Kizza Musaazi stands behind the latrines at Mpigi UMEA Primary School, describing the features of his portable incinerator. The mud at his feet is red. So are the uniforms of the children who surge and subside in waves as he delivers his tutorial.
Musaazi is telling me about the unit's three-chamber design, which allows it to heat to almost twice the temperature of other incinerators manufactured here, in his native Uganda. He points out a fat pipe running into the girls' toilet stall to facilitate the discreet disposal of sanitary pads. Smiling broadly, Musaazi slides out a metal panel that bisects the pipe. "Most of the time when the incinerator is burning, this stays in," he explains. "But if you remove it, the smoke goes back up into the bathroom and drives away the flies."
What I like about the incinerator, besides the fly thing, is that it represents a kind of turnkey thinking about human suffering. In Uganda, where more than 50 percent of the population survives on less than $1.25 a day, social problems abound. A holistic innovator, Musaazi attacks those problems in clusters. The origin problem in this particular cluster is girls' abandoning school when they reach puberty. They do so because 1. They cannot afford sanitary napkins 2. They cannot privately dispose of sanitary napkins and 3. They cannot wash, because school bathrooms—walled-off holes in the ground—lack running water.
Musaazi's solution to Problem No. 1 is the MakaPad, a sanitary napkin made of papyrus and paper waste. It costs less than a third as much as global brands. Introduced in 2006, the product accounts for roughly half the revenue of his Kampala-based company, Technology for Tomorrow, or T4T. Musaazi also designed the incinerator, which addresses Problem No. 2, as well as a larger version for medical waste sold to hospitals and health centers. Musaazi attacks Problem No. 3 with rainwater-harvesting tanks and solar water heaters.
The water tanks are constructed from curved, interlocking dirt bricks, which Musaazi created as an alternative to traditional fired bricks, whose baking consumes whole forests. He also uses his bricks to build granaries, meant to generate income for peasant farmers year round and help schools store maize for affordable lunches. Those lunches might be prepared on one of Musaazi's hybrid cook stoves, which by the way also heat water for use in kitchens. Did I mention that steam from the incinerators produces power?
"I think things through from beginning to end, because when people need this, they will also need that, and there is always great need, and to waste something is a catastrophe," says Musaazi, a calm and courtly man of 60 whose motto—emblazoned on his office doors and on the dashboard of his Toyota minivan—is the Bugandan phrase Gakyali Mabaga ("So little done. So much more to do."). "If I dig a pit latrine, I should be able to use the dirt to make bricks. If I build a water tank, why not make it a little bigger so the person can sell the excess water and have an income?"
When Western entrepreneurs engage in the developing world, they typically target a single (intractable, overwhelming) problem. Musaazi, by contrast, grapples with a range of Uganda's myriad ills. He is constantly expanding his portfolio of simple, inexpensive technologies because his country's population continues to expand, creating new problems and deepening old ones. Uganda has the world's second-highest birthrate, with an average 6.7 children per family and a median age of just 15.
Few subjects ruffle Musaazi, who exhibits none of the nervous energy or intensity typical of Western entrepreneurs. But when discussing overpopulation, he accelerates from melancholy to cynicism in no time flat. "We pick up so much from the West in terms of wanting the clothing, wanting the iPhones," he says as we sit in traffic, gulping exhaust until I start to feel like one of those bathroom flies. "Why don't we pick up the idea that the last three American Presidents had no more than two children, and Clinton only had one?"
Many of Musaazi's customers are nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, and other philanthropic groups that share his concern. Among them is One School at a Time, a nonprofit based in Eldorado Springs, Colorado, that rehabilitates Ugandan schools and helps local people manage the schools better. "People coming from the West want to bring our own technologies," says Bay Roberts, the organization's director, who has deployed T4T's brick presses and rainwater-harvesting systems for seven years. "But those may not make sense culturally and can't be maintained or fixed once we leave.
"Moses is fantastic, because he's a Ugandan thinking up local solutions," says Roberts. "He understands the culture. He understands the poverty. And he's coming up with these smart, simple technologies that work."
The drive to Makerere University from downtown Kampala takes 15 minutes and 10 years off my life. Ugandan traffic resembles a countrywide game of chicken, with real chickens (and cattle, goats, and dogs) sauntering across the road for extra points. Men in suits, women cradling infants, and the occasional nun perch composedly on the backs of ubiquitous motorcycle taxis, called boda bodas. The roadsides are clogged with hawkers of second-hand clothes, potatoes, furniture, religious medallions, and anything else that can be sold, bought, and perhaps sold again. More-urban areas teem with tiny businesses marketing a life cycle of services from birth (Jolly and Lowly Primary School) to death (Curious Funeral Services).
T4T resides in the Technology Development and Transfer Centre, a deceptively drab structure in the shadow of the university's College of Engineering, Design, Art, and Technology. (In addition to running the business, Musaazi is a lecturer in electrical engineering here. Makerere donates the space but is not otherwise connected to T4T.) Eleven years ago, Musaazi and a student crew erected the building as both home and showplace for his research. It is constructed from the interlocking bricks; in front stands an incinerator modified to power a small generator with steam. At the back, a 30,000-liter tank collects rainwater from the roof and pumps it inside, a silent reproof to the engineering building, whose cascading runoff has gouged a narrow moat in the dirt track between itself and its diminutive neighbor. "This building is the only one on campus that is self-sufficient in terms of water," says Musaazi. "The university uses the main water supply, and sometimes the machinery breaks, and they announce that for the next three days, we will not have water. But I always have my flush toilets."
