There is a popular saying that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. While this may be true, at Prikkle Academy, we believe that necessity shouldn’t always be the reason to want to invent.
Education is life itself.
It starts from the womb to the tomb, it begins from cradle to the grave, from dawn to dusk, on every soil, and in every plane.
For a long time, we have boxed Education to only mean schooling, but that’s the past, something is happening and we have to fully bring in creativity and innovation into our Educational system.
At Prikkle Academy, we are breaking all the barrier and boxes that have always existed on what knowledge, learning, solving problems and living a healthier and peaceful life means.
This is why our participants recently decided to look into the idea of creating some valuable and essentially useful solution for everyday life with a resource that we mostly discard every day.
We turned human feaces into organic charcoal.
Yes, that’s right. You can read that again.
Our work in the grassroots communities of Nigeria has exposed us to the thousands of trees that are cut down every day to use as cooking fuel at home.
Every day, we see several hours of huge burning to make these charcoals. Think of changes in climate? The damage is growing bigger, not just in the cities but in rural communities.
How do we solve this problem? Our participants sat together, they researched, they dug into the depths of knowledge and read everything they could find.
Their curiosity and love for solving problems using our approach to education (identifying personal and community assets to use it to solve community problems) have yielded a result that we are proud of.
The entire process took about 10 days to get the fine organic charcoal from raw human feaces. It took roughly 3 hours to get the real work done.
Our excitement is that it will now be possible for out trees to be left and not cut down for fuel. We can now use the human feaces that we usually consider as waste as a source of fuel and profit.
In the next few months ahead, we are working on the technology to automate this whole production process and produce in large quantities.
We are also working on creating other products from human feaces – cooking gas, electricity, and fertilizers for farmers.
All these are work in progress and we are glad to share that these innovations are happening because we are curious problem solvers, and we want to see that we can solve our problems with our skills, collaboration, creativity, and asset.
We tested the burning capacity of our charcoal with the ones created from wood and we realized that they burn almost at the same rate.
What do you think about this?
What projects are you working on too? Scroll down and share it with us in the comment section..
#PrikkleAcademy..inspiring community builders.