Ugali Maker

Ugali maker, the solution to back pain, exposure to high temperature and smoke when making ugali for schools and restaurants, while conserving Environment.

Roughly 71% of more than 5,100 schools in Tanzania use Ugali as food for students. And making large quantity of ugali is difficulty, painful,sweating, long exposure to smoke and high temperature, results to inedible food and energy & time consuming. 

Ugali maker, the sustainable solution that uses gas and electricity to make ugali with no smoke, simple to use, doesn't use fuel-wood hence reducing the number of trees cut for making charcoal and for Fuel-wood( deforestation)

Ugali maker, is an electro-mechanical machine that makes/cooks ugali using gas and electricity, replacing fuel wood and charcoal. Ugali is a stiff porridge made from hot water and corn, cassava flour, popular food in Tanzania and Africa.

We target the schools, hotels and restaurants. More than 5000 secondary schools in Tanzania, use Ugali as student feed and method and preparations of it are unsustainable; back pain, exposure to high temperature and smoke to chefs, inedible food to students, and deforestation to environment.

Ugali maker is healthy, sustainable and simple to use device that makes ugali in short time and effective.

I personally studied in public school, I have experience in the situation. It always took less than a month to finish 1ton of fuel wood. It takes at least 2hrs to make ugali for 800 students with 2 chefs and I served as a leader supervising the preparations and distribution of food to students. Now I love social innovation; with my team who has the likely experience, we need to be the solution or at least contribute to good health and sustainability.

Yes, we engaged 2 users (schools in Arusha Tanzania) and we discovered more than 75% of secondary schools in Tanzania will need the solution, excluding hotels, prisons, military bases, refugees camps and primary schools.

Now we volunteer as Creativity trainers at Twende social innovation center, where we are given a free working space to make our prototype and access to tools. And through this center we go to different schools training about innovation as well as say a thing or two about our machine.

Current method of making ugali requires the use of fuel wood or charcoal, strong man or women to do the activity, and in schools it takes more than an hour in the smoky and hot kitchen dangerous to health, and still getting inedible food (ugali).

Our solution use gas and electricity which ensures health and sustainability, It's time saving and any one can operate it and its simple to use, that's to say it is safe and with high efficiency, the cook operates it, and it makes ugali. This is how the solution is innovative.

As we have one working prototype, we want to apply for government opportunity which may happen by the Ministry of science, technology and innovation so that the government recognizes our efforts because we do not have funds to develop it in this 2023.

We also gathering more information about the problem to see where we have to change our solution according to demand of our target group.

And we speak to private schools as proposing our solutions, if we can make one for them.

Our solution uses electronics and motor which gives our machine mechanical power to do the task. Thus it comprises of little software technology and much on hardware technology as ugali making is much mechanical, and gas and electricity makes it sophisticated.

We have not scaled up our solution yet, but if we take only schools; we expect to serve more than 5000 secondary schools in Tanzania. And then expanding to primary schools, refugees camps orphanage centers etc.

After that we consider to expand to our neighboring countries to contribute for sustainability.

• Financial barrier to buy parts and materials required to scale up our solution.
• Cultural barrier as most of people believes using fuel wood or charcoal makes the food more tasty than using gas and electricity. Also most places in Africa believes ugali must be made by a person not machine, we shares the benefits the solution has to overcome that.
• We also want to sell the solutions to institution and organizations (B2B), but we lack the intellectual property ownership and legal registration of the business.

We partner with Twende to use the working space and technical assistance as twende is an NGO that empowers innovators to make the solutions of challenges facing their own communities (Social Innovation)

We do B2B business model, later on we  will have Business to customer too, with three revenue models which are;

• Direct sales
• Make to order and
• Subscription sales

Direct sales, subscriptions and making to order are our revenue models, and our product is Ugali maker as shown here https://1drv.ms/u/s!AizmKW3ppM...