Stichting Connect International

What are SMART Techs?
These are effective products, imperative for health, produced with local skills, tools and materials, affordable for the poor, and easy and cheap to operate and maintain. Examples: hand drilled boreholes with Rope pump, simple improved pit latrines, tippy tap hand wash facilities, dish racks, etc.

Why SMART Techs?
Technologies introduced in developing countries were often complex, expensive and made of imported parts. An example is the hand piston pump for rural water supply. Despite improved designs and training many piston pumps in sub-Saharan countries do not function because communities cannot manage them (spare parts not available or too expensive, complex maintenance, etc.). SMART Techs do not have these disadvantages as they are cheap, locally produced and easy to maintain. For instance, compared to the piston pump the Rope pump is up to 70% cheaper while over 90% of the 80.000 Rope pumps installed worldwide (serving over 3 million people) stay working.

How to introduce SMART Techs?
Together with our partner SHIPO in Tanzania we provide extensive training courses and capacity building trajectories for local companies and NGO’s that want to produce or introduce SMART Techs. We have a brand new large SMART Techs training centre in Njombe, Tanzania, expatriate and local professional trainers, and well developed guiding tools for production and marketing of SMART Techs.

A typical process we apply to assist a local company or NGO with the introduction of SMART Techs is:

1. General introduction training
2. On-site investigation and pilots by SHIPO with involved stakeholders
3. Develop a plan of action and get funding
4. Implement the plan, including a trajectory of custom made training and + off-site guidance by SHIPO

For further details see the attached document ‘SHIPO SMART Techs support’.
For an idea of an introductory training course (phase 1) see the attached document ‘SHIPO 2-day introduction to SMART Techs’.

Cost-benefit of SMART Techs

Two examples:

1. Local masons producing concrete slabs for latrines
   In Mozambique our partner ADPP trains and guides local masons to produce reinforced concrete slabs for simple improved pit latrines and market these among villagers on a commercial basis. The local mason gets a loan or several bags of cement and some reinforcement steel and repays this later to ADPP (or the beneficiary repays the loan straight to ADPP which takes the risk away from the mason).

   Cost
   About 200 Euro first year and 50 Euro per year afterwards per mason.

   Benefit
   A local mason markets and produces about 50 to even 100 proper reinforced concrete slabs per year.

   Bottleneck
   Transport (masons have a bike but to cycle over 15 km on a dusty road with two bags of cement on the back of the bicycle is not easy; solutions are tried now in giving local masons loans to buy second hand 100 CC motor cycles and transport of materials to villages that have ordered more than 4 slabs by car of ADPP).




2. Local company producing rope pumps
   In all three TAZAMO countries our partner organizations train, guide and quality control existing local companies to produce Rope pumps.

   Cost
   Approximately 1.000 Euro first year and 300 Euro per year afterwards per company.

   Benefit
   The local companies produce 200 or more Rope pumps per year.

   Bottleneck
   Quality control by the partner organization requires constant attention as companies tend to forget about quality norms and proper production techniques.

Movie School Sanitation project