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Hello kind folks,
I'll briefly introduce myself: my name is Senne, and I'm an Industrial Design student from Belgium. I am currently in my graduation year, and one of our courses requires us to create a small business project. What this means is really simple: we need to create a startup company in a team of three students and try to launch our own product.
Our team decided to start from a well-known issue; water scarcity in sub-saharan Africa, more specifically the Sahel region. Said region is very dry with water sources spread out across the land. This requires the inhabitants to walk miles and miles on end just to fetch water to be able to cook. Women and children are mostly the ones tasked with this intensive labour; for them, fetching water dominates the day. It pushes aside all other activities, such as education and free time to play and develop personal interests. The problem statement is shown in detail in the video below, which was made by an organization called "living water africa":
By now, you're probably wondering where you, the Pack Goat Central board visitor, comes in. Let me elaborate on that. What we also know, is that Africa is a continent with a very high amount of goats. In the Sahel region, they are mostly kept for their meat and milk, and families often have herds of goats themselves. We aim to make these herds serve a bigger purpose: to task them with the labour of fetching water, so that children have the time to go to school and women are able to partake in cash-generating business activities.
So how do we aim to do that? We found that goats are excellent packing animals, so we want to develop a backpack for ghoats specifically aimed towards the Sahel region and the task of carrying water. The herds of goats have to be brought to grazing areas, so they are mostly already accustomed to being herded. What we aim for, is to have shepherds bring the herds to the nearby water source, where they load them with water supplies and bring them back to the town: this way, more water can be collected daily while the people themselves are free to do other activities.
We got our hands dirty by immersing ourselves in the world of goat packing with a minor first test, which learned us that a healthy animal doesn't seem to mind some extra weight put on its back (the one we used to test this on wasn't even really accustomed to human beings but didn't care at all).
![[Image: qirL0ja.jpg?2]](http://i.imgur.com/qirL0ja.jpg?2)
Right now we're in the designing phase; we've been looking at a variety of benchmarks such as existing products for goat packing, as well as projects of likeminded companies that want to make life easier for African inhabitants when it comes to gathering water. We're going to start prototyping soon, making a variety of test products in different materials and with different design considerations taken into account based on all the information we can find.
![[Image: VRQgUOh.jpg?1]](http://i.imgur.com/VRQgUOh.jpg?1)
The point of this topic, is to gather valuable knowledge from people who are experienced in the field of packing with goats. We've been talking with organisations such as Veterinarians without Borders and people who are working on water installations in the region, and we've received valuable feedback from them: they all confirm that the problem we're trying to tackle is an existing one and they think that our project could work, but it's hard for us to find people who can give us input on the idea itself when it comes to using goats as backpackers.
So by all means, we would appreciate it very much if you could take a look at our project and give us any feedback that comes to mind: thoughts, tips, possible pitfalls and so on. If you have any questions for us, please do ask them and we'll try our best to provide a solid answer as fast as we can. If you follow this link, you'll be lead to a product presentation which kind of sums up the story i've told above.
Thank you very much for your time!
Kind regards from Belgium,
Senne, Jeremi and Robbe
I'll briefly introduce myself: my name is Senne, and I'm an Industrial Design student from Belgium. I am currently in my graduation year, and one of our courses requires us to create a small business project. What this means is really simple: we need to create a startup company in a team of three students and try to launch our own product.
Our team decided to start from a well-known issue; water scarcity in sub-saharan Africa, more specifically the Sahel region. Said region is very dry with water sources spread out across the land. This requires the inhabitants to walk miles and miles on end just to fetch water to be able to cook. Women and children are mostly the ones tasked with this intensive labour; for them, fetching water dominates the day. It pushes aside all other activities, such as education and free time to play and develop personal interests. The problem statement is shown in detail in the video below, which was made by an organization called "living water africa":
By now, you're probably wondering where you, the Pack Goat Central board visitor, comes in. Let me elaborate on that. What we also know, is that Africa is a continent with a very high amount of goats. In the Sahel region, they are mostly kept for their meat and milk, and families often have herds of goats themselves. We aim to make these herds serve a bigger purpose: to task them with the labour of fetching water, so that children have the time to go to school and women are able to partake in cash-generating business activities.
So how do we aim to do that? We found that goats are excellent packing animals, so we want to develop a backpack for ghoats specifically aimed towards the Sahel region and the task of carrying water. The herds of goats have to be brought to grazing areas, so they are mostly already accustomed to being herded. What we aim for, is to have shepherds bring the herds to the nearby water source, where they load them with water supplies and bring them back to the town: this way, more water can be collected daily while the people themselves are free to do other activities.
We got our hands dirty by immersing ourselves in the world of goat packing with a minor first test, which learned us that a healthy animal doesn't seem to mind some extra weight put on its back (the one we used to test this on wasn't even really accustomed to human beings but didn't care at all).
Right now we're in the designing phase; we've been looking at a variety of benchmarks such as existing products for goat packing, as well as projects of likeminded companies that want to make life easier for African inhabitants when it comes to gathering water. We're going to start prototyping soon, making a variety of test products in different materials and with different design considerations taken into account based on all the information we can find.
The point of this topic, is to gather valuable knowledge from people who are experienced in the field of packing with goats. We've been talking with organisations such as Veterinarians without Borders and people who are working on water installations in the region, and we've received valuable feedback from them: they all confirm that the problem we're trying to tackle is an existing one and they think that our project could work, but it's hard for us to find people who can give us input on the idea itself when it comes to using goats as backpackers.
So by all means, we would appreciate it very much if you could take a look at our project and give us any feedback that comes to mind: thoughts, tips, possible pitfalls and so on. If you have any questions for us, please do ask them and we'll try our best to provide a solid answer as fast as we can. If you follow this link, you'll be lead to a product presentation which kind of sums up the story i've told above.
Thank you very much for your time!
Kind regards from Belgium,
Senne, Jeremi and Robbe