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Twende

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Innovation center working towards a world with more local solutions to local challenges

Twende is a social enterprise dedicated to empowering local community members to improve their quality of life through the innovation and implementation of low-cost technologies. As an innovation center of Tanzanian students and instructors, Twende aims to merge local experience and technical knowledge into affordable innovations. Technologies built at Twende are affordable, comprised of locally available materials, and address a specific social need. Through school and community workshops, Twende supports aspiring entrepreneurs in the creation of their own solutions to community problems. Led by Tanzanian inventor Bernard Kiwia, Twende aims to be a beacon of social innovation and technological empowerment in Arusha, Tanzania and around the globe.

Very few technologies currently address the needs of rural Tanzanian communities. And those that do, often fail to substantially improve quality of life in villages for following reasons.
1. Rural technologies often are designed and manufactured abroad, leaving Tanzanian villagers unable to repair their devices, especially when materials are not locally available.
2. These technologies are not developed with a rich understanding of local needs and resources, often making them irrelevant or impractical. For example, technologies that require electricity are useless for most Tanzanian villagers who do not have access to or cannot afford electricity.
3. Most rural technologies are too expensive for the average villager. These problems have left an estimated 30 million villagers without access to technology to charge phones, see at night, and harvest their crops. Not only would these villagers stand to benefit from more productive technologies, but so would the Tanzanian economy as a whole.

Twende technologies address the aforementioned problems through the development of intermediate technologies that
1. utilize locally available materials,
2. are designed WITH rather than FOR village communities,
3. derive out of village needs and imperative,
4. are inexpensive and affordable for villagers,
5. are able to be repaired locally.

Twende is able to develop these technologies by engaging communities through community workshops and providing vital technical support and tools through its innovation center platform. Following the teachings of Amy Smith and her colleagues at MIT’s D-Lab, Twende has adopted a new model of community-based innovation called creative capacity building (CCB). Through technology workshops, Twende engages students and villagers in creating their own technologies to improve health and safety, save labor and time, and increase their incomes. Through an interactive, hands-on curriculum, people of all education levels are able to become active creators of technology, not just passive recipients.

A key component of the follow-up to the CCB training is a space where people can come together, apply what they have learned to design, and build technologies that can positively affect their lives. The Twende workshop ideally serves as this nexus of creativity, where aspiring inventors can learn about new technologies, develop their mechanics and design skills, prototype their ideas, create technology products, incubate micro-enterprises and obtain guidance on how to market the technologies that they create. Workshop tools are available to all participating community members and maintained through a small fee.