IED 2016 Research Projects

  The project   In the context of the minor International Entrepreneurship & Development a team of multidisciplinary students travelled to Kisumu, Kenya to help designing bike accessories for the local charitable business, CooP-Kenya. The team consists of two Technical Policy and Management students, Sjoerd Kop and Bram de Kruiff, and one Civil Engineering student, Charlotte Mekel. The team…

Walking through Amsterdam, the capital city of the Netherlands, you have to watch your step for cyclists coming from every single direction. There is no street without  cyclists and there’s no street without bicycles parked. About one fifth, estimated with what is seen on the streets, of the bicycles in the Netherlands have a crate in front of the handlebar, generally made out of wood or plastic.

What do we do? At the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology (JOOUST), in Bondo (Kenya), research has been conducted on the improvement of the technology and capacity of the smallholder farmers of Siaya county. In last year's project, two greenhouses have been built on university grounds, including a water harvesting system. This year these greenhouses are supposed to…

At Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology, in Bondo - Kenya, experiments and research have been conducted on the improvement of technology and capacity of smallholder farmers in the surroundings. At a distance of 20 km in the village Siaya a farmers cooperative is functioning, linked to a local primary and a local secondary school. The school is supported by a Dutch…

  In Okana, a small rural village in Kenya, a community centre has been partly realised. This community centre will facilitate a library, ICT facilities, Internet Café and a sewing workshop. The project is initiated by the Kenyan NGO ‘Sustainable Rural Initiatives' and two architecture students from the TU Delft, who formerly participated in the minor. The NGO wants to improve the living…

The Pokot is a pastoral tribe in the remote Rift Valley Province of Kenya, coping with challenging living conditions: prolonged droughts result in scarcity of water and food, while subsequent heavy rainfalls wash away their fertile soil. Moreover, they are facing health issues due to lack of knowledge about personal hygiene, Female Genital Mutilation, malaria and HIV/AIDS.  To improve their…

The project Kenya is an amazing country with some big complex problems. We are Chris Berg, Jochem Michiels and Ivo van der Horst and we would like to solve one of these problems. Our goal is to create jobs and perspective for the jobless youth of Molo, in Kenya. Explore, connect, plan and execute: those are the three key activities we will be performing in the time we will go to Molo. Since we…

Sengerema Young Entrepreneurs http://www.mvrf.nl/sengerema-starterkapitaal-voor-jonge-entrepreneurs  is established in 2008 and officially registered with Sengerema District Council as a Community Based Organization (CBO) in 2009. It is supported by a Dutch foundation. The main objective of SYE is to support youth to get (more) entrepreneurial skills and required start-up/growth capital (loans…

One day in a corner of the world a light went on. An idea was born. Great minds had worked together to illuminate the world with a new phenomenon, electricity. The possibilities with this new technique were endless and nowadays we can’t imagine life without it. We, as motivated students from different study fields, believe illuminating ideas based on new technologies can change a world . In this…

Food shortages and especially the production of nutritious vegetables by sustainable farming is an important issue in all of Africa, but also in Ghana. AfroEuro, the Dutch organization of Ghanaian migrants in the diaspora, supported by a Dutch greenhouse company, has taken initiative to start up a medium-sized greenhouse company in Ghana in the neighborhood of Kumasi. Under the supervision of…

Zambia is larger than Germany and the United Kingdom combined but has only 14 million inhabitants. Connecting the electricity grid to every household and business in a developing country with such a low population density is impossible but access to electricity remains very important for economic development. FuturaSun, an Italian solar PV manufacturer, and Necor, a Zambian ICT company, are…

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Amrita University) is a private university spread across South India in the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Amrita Univeristy offers the Live-in-Labs program -  a multidisciplinary, “theory into practice” initative that facilitates the research, development, and deployment of sustainable solutions for current challenges faced by rural communities in India.

Project introduction Lantana camara, an exotic weed of South American origin is invading different forest areas and posing a serious threat to native vegetation in Western Ghats including Siruvani area (part of Tamil Nadu Forest Department). There is pressing need to control the invasion of this weed which is affecting biodiversity of native vegetation in different forest areas. The Forest…

The University of Amrita adopted 101 villages and is providing the villages with sanitation, electricity etc. Next to investments in the village, they are trying to make them self-sustainable. Those villagers usually don't have a reliable form of income. This result in the inability of investing in themselves. The live-in-labs program is started to help those villagers with this problem.  What…

SweepSmart is a Smart Inclusive Waste Franchise system that cleans India’s streets and empowers the informal waste sector (former ragpickers) with European waste management knowledge. India has a huge waste problem, with streets and rivers becoming polluted. The informal sector, especially waste pickers, are exploited and work under miserable working conditions with a highly fluctuating income…

From November 2016 until the end of January 2017 we will be in Suriname to do market research into the possibility of selling industrially produced aluminium greenhouses to small farming entrepreneurs. Suriname has been in an economic crisis since 2015, because the country has mainly focused its economic powers towards finding, mining and exporting quarrying products like gold, oil and bauxite.

Growing abundantly in Nicaragua, bamboo is an untapped local and natural resource, with great potential to provide a sustainable alternative for conventional buildings methods. Since 2014 Bambú Social has been committed to develop this potential together with local communities. They designed and built a sustainable model house from bamboo with an integrated water collection and purification…