Kenyan Team Wins 2nd Place, $10,000
in Wege Prize 2016 Michigan,
USA
Five Kenyan women currently studying abroad at different
colleges and universities around the world are working together to improve
living conditions in the impoverished urban areas of their home country, and
their efforts recently earned them 2nd place and $10,000 in Wege Prize 2016, a
global student design competition focused on the circular economy.
Organized by Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State
University’s (KCAD’s) Wege Center for Sustainable Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
USA, Wege Prize challenges teams of undergraduate students from around the
world to work across institutional and disciplinary boundaries, converging
their knowledge and perspectives to design a product, service, or business model
that can function within and facilitate a paradigm shift toward a circular
economy, an economic model in which resources and capital are regenerative.
Named Kenyan Youths for a Circular Economy, or KYCE, the team of
Stephanie Ageng’o, studying Law at Anglia Ruskin University in the United
Kingdom; Lavender Micalo, studying Biochemistry at Roanoke College in the
United States; Lydiah Mpyisi, studying Environmental Science and Biology at
Roanoke College; Kathleen Murarya, studying Mathematics and Science at
Westchester Community College in the United States; and Phenny Omondi, studying
Agronomy and Environmental Science at EARTH University in Costa Rica, unveiled
an ambitious plan to improve the poor economic and sanitary conditions of
Kibera, Kenya’s largest urban slum, where each of the women were born and have
spent a majority of their lives.
In Kibera, overpopulation, poverty, and a lack of proper
sanitation facilities has resulted in a number of growing environmental and
personal health problems including disease, pollution, and lack of access to
clean water.
“Our team originally met at the Millennium Campus Conference in
New York City at the United Nations headquarters, and during the conference we
began talking about how we could come together as Kenyan youths to help our
country achieve the sustainability goals that were adopted by the UN in 2015. A
few months later we heard about Wege Prize and wanted to get involved,” said
Micalo.
Mpyisi, who presented her team’s
solution in the final stage of the competition, added, ““We
wanted to integrate existing community-based organizations and work together
with the government and the locals to come up with solutions that can disrupt
the existing wicked problems in Kenya’s urban
slums.”
By orchestrating a collaboration between Peepoople, a nonprofit
that manufactures and distributes portable toilets that transform human waste
into valuable fertilizer; The Community Cooker Foundation, a nonprofit that
works to provide communities with bio-digesters that can transform
environmental waste into energy; and the Kenyan government, KYCE plans to pave
the way for a circular system in which Kibera’s most
formidable problems can become assets for growth and development.
Using the Community Cooker Foundation’s bio-digesters,
Kibera’s environmental waste would be upcycled into inexpensive and
clean heat energy that would provide residents with a means of cooking food and
boiling water for safe consumption. Using Peepoople’s Pepoo
product, a biodegradable and self-sanitizing human waste receptacle that
inactivates harmful pathogens, would give Kibera’s
residents an affordable and sanitary means of relieving themselves and allow
human waste that is currently polluting the environment to be upcycled as
fertilizer for large community gardens that would take the place of existing
urban landfills.
“We
really appreciated that team KYCE chose to work on a problem in a context that
they had personal connection to,” said
judge Gretchen Hooker, who works as a Biomimicry Specialist for the Biomimicry
Institute. “Their system redesign leverages existing resources in the
community in new ways and meets an acute need affecting many people.”
KYCE has already begun connecting with Peepoople, The Community
Cooker, and local Kenyan governments to put their plan into action. They hope
to use the funds awarded in Wege Prize 2016 to help officially solidify the
necessary partnerships and resources to move their idea forward.
“We’re now going to start finalizing all of our partnerships on paper,
and we also want to take steps to ensure that our project is sustainable, and
that the change we want to see happen in Kibera actually does happen,” said
Mpyisi. “Being named a finalist in a global competition like Wege Prize
really gave us a voice to approach these organizations and prove to them that
our idea is worth listening to.”
Other winning solutions in Wege Prize 2016 included a solution
that focuses on creating an on-site waste treatment system for hospitals that
minimizes environmental impact while maximizing the ability of the system to
recover resources, and a solution that would help Technology for Tomorrow Ltd.,
an existing company in Uganda that manufactures sanitary pads
out of papyrus, adopt a circular model for meeting the heating and electricity
needs of its production facilities through biomass gasification of papyrus and
paper waste materials.
Thanks to the generous support of The Wege Foundation, which recently awarded
$444,000 in grant funding to KCAD’s Wege
Center for Sustainable Design to continue running the competition for the next
four years, Wege Prize 2017 will be open to any undergraduate student in the
world, and will again be focused on the circular economy.
Team registration will open in August 2016, but those interested
in participating are encouraged to begin building their teams and brainstorming
ideas now. Educators and other professionals who are interested in contributing
their expertise are encouraged to contact wicked@wegeprize.org for
more information.
