(A column highlighting scientific, technological, engineering and design innovation in Africa)
Senegalese mechanical engineer Sanoussi Diakité developed an electric and thermal-powered machine that husks five kilograms of fonio, a staple grain in West Africa, in just eight minutes. He is seeking funds to mass-produce the patented machine.
Diakité’s husking device won the 2013 African Innovation Prize for Social Impact, placing him third in the overall competition. He developed the machine in 1993 in his spare time as a high school teacher in Dakar, and built the prototypes with his students, using his own funds.
Fonio is rich in iron, protein, and fiber, and can survive in tough conditions, producing up to three crops a year even in poor soil or drought. The grains are so tiny that it is difficult to remove the brittle outer shell (husk). Women do so manually by pounding and threshing a grain and sand mixture with a pestle and mortar, and then washing the sand away.
Diakité’s machine takes the tedium of husking this highly nutritious grain manually, as women have been doing for more than 500 years. The device gently abrades the surface of the seed before passing through a rotating mechanism that removes the husks. The machine can husk 50 kilos of fonio per hour and leaves little sand in the husked product. By comparison, a woman can process only one to two kilos by hand in the same time, and must use about 15 liters of water to remove the sand.
The fonio husking machine also earned Diakité a Rolex Award for applied technology in 1996. In 2008, The Tech Awards named him a laureate in the Health Award category. Today, his machine is used in several African nations, revitalizing fonio cultivation in areas where it had been all but abandoned because of the painstaking task of manual husking.
