A team of students, professors and alumni from San Diego State University is entering the next phase in a plan to create portable threshing machines they believe could revolutionize farming in Ethiopia.
Through federal funds and a grant from Rotary International, the award-winning concept could be in the hands of Ethiopian farmers in time for the 2016 fall harvest, said SDSU professor Michael Sloan.
Sloan is one of the team members and director of social entrepreneurship at the university’s Lavin Entrepreneurship Center.
In another big step for the alumnus-led company overseeing the project, a donor has come forward to help pay for the construction of a school in the village of Simbo, Ethiopia, ancestral home of SDSU 2011 graduate Gemechu Abraham, who conceived the project.
“We’re so fortunate,” Abraham said Tuesday from Beaverton, Ore., where he is working with his family in a business that helps developmentally disabled people. “Every day I have to pinch myself and say, ‘OK, this is real.’ ”
Abraham, 24, created W.E. Do Good — short for World Entrepreneurs Doing Good — in 2012 with a goal of building a school in Ethiopia, where he was born and moved from at age 5.
A trip to Simbo during his college years left Abraham shocked at seeing what passed for a schoolhouse.
“These kids were literally learning under trees,” he said. “Some were sitting on the ground. I thought it’s something I’ve got to change.”
After learning that many children miss school to work on their family’s small farms, Abraham realized there was a need for modernized farming equipment, which he said will make harvesting more efficient and keep students in class.
Working with Sloan and engineering students at SDSU, W.E. Do Good began developing a portable thresher powered with a foot pedal to harvest teff, a nutritious grain grown by about 6.5 million farmers in Ethiopia.
Adding a social entrepreneurship component, the plan calls for Ethiopian women to use micro loans to buy the machines, which will cost about $250 each, and then rent them to farmers.
The concept earned the SDSU College of Business Administration team a first place award of $100,000 in cash and in-kind support this year from the Values and Ventures Business Plan Competition held at Texas Christian University.
Student engineers are about three months from finishing the final prototype of the thresher, which Sloan said is expected to more than quadruple the amount of grain harvested in a fraction of the time it takes through the method now used, which involves livestock stomping on plants.
Sloan is preparing for an August trip to Washington, D.C., to lobby for $150,000 from the United States International Development Agency and is working with Project Concern International in San Diego to apply for a $100,000 Rotary grant.
Some welcomed but unsolicited money also has been offered to the school from a woman who read about the project in an April article in The San Diego Union-Tribune.
“What they’ve done is amazing, amazing, amazing,” Jo Ann Weissman of Imperial said about the thresher project.
Source: utsandiego.com
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