Innovation for development: BRCK

A few months ago I had the opportunity to participate in a cultural exchange program that gave high school students in Berlin the chance practice their English while learning about the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals and life in South America, Asia and Africa. We huddled in groups and the young minds came up with all sorts of ways to achieve the eight goals set out by the United Nations. Their ideas ranged from MOOC’s crowd-funding and genetically modified mosquitoes - let it not be said that the Twitter-generation is intrinsically plugged in to innovative solutions. However, one theme kept on re-occurring;  how we would overcome the lack of a reliable electricity supply in a way that was not cost-prohibitive.

We discussed generators and even found a report from eNA on some young Nigerian students who created a generator that ran on urine. While novel, we need something that was sturdy, portable, and had a simple user-friendly design, the availability of urine notwithstanding. If only we had come across the crowd-funded BRCK internet generator from Ushahidi, a Nairobi based outfit.

The idea of BRCK is simple, to mate a modem with a battery to create a gadget that allows up to twenty devices to be connected to its hotspot while providing 8hours of battery power with a 16GB of battery power. As the blurb on Kickstarter attests, ‘(it’s) is like a backup generator for the internet’. The idea is so sweetly simple and innovative; it is exactly what ICT4D should look like if it had a physical embodiment.  The creators acknowledge that the connectivity solutions in emerging economies leave much to be desired. Furthermore developers and entrepreneurs should not necessarily try to meet the best practices of New York or London but create their own practices that fit with the infrastructure available in developing countries. We cannot wait for a fiber optic grid to reach remote villages but we can utilize our knowledge of how information technology already functions in our limited resource settings and make the next technical leap.

The story of BRCK itself is empowering from the female face of the start-up Juliana Riotch a Kenyan native to the crowd-funding was it is what social enterprise or social innovation can be if it escaped theory and the future-speak rhetoric. BRCK is what disruptive technology should look like for the developing world. With an idea so unique a commercially attractive it fits the products chosen motto “if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.”