Quantifying the impact of improved stoves and fuels designed to combat the health and environmental burdens of traditional cooking is necessary to ensure sustainable outcomes but remains challenging for practitioners. The current standard method to determine household fuel consumption, the...

The cost-effectiveness and reliability of waste collection services in informal settlements can be difficult to optimize given the geospatial and temporal variability of latrine use. Daily servicing to avoid overflow events is inefficient, but dynamic scheduling of latrine servicing could reduce...

This paper proposes a methodology for "design for localisation" that addresses the challenge of designing a product for local manufacture and use, whilst considering the production process availability and the context of the local geographic area. The methodology is derived from a case study of...

In 2009, fibre-optic cables landed on the East coast of Africa, the last major area of the world to be connected to the Internet triggering a decade of Internet development (Graham et al., 2015). During the same period, there has been a general transformation of the Internet from static content...

The frequency and severity of extreme weather events have increased over the last 30 years, making predictability of weather a challenge. Weather extreme events often cause adverse impacts to lives and property. Thus, accurate and timely provision of weather data is becoming crucial to improve...

While monitoring the effectiveness of forest conservation programs requires accurate data on (changes in) forest cover, many countries still lack the ability to map local forest inventory, especially in the drylands of Africa where forest areas are very sparsely covered. In this paper, we...

There has been considerable debate regarding the efficacy of international aid in meeting the dual goals of human development and environmental sustainability. Many donors have sought to engage with this challenge by introducing environmental safeguard and monitoring initiatives; however,...

Smallholder farmers are increasingly exposed to weather extremes but lack access to affordable insurance products for catastrophic crop damage. This paper analyzes the feasibility of Picture-Based Insurance (PBI) as a low-cost tool to improve coverage. PBI verifies insurance claims using...

Public health interventions targeting contaminated drinking water and indoor air pollution may help to reduce two of the leading causes of death among children under 5 in Rwanda - diarrhea and pneumonia. These interventions also have the potential to provide economic benefits, including...

Direct DC Solar (DDS) electricity can inexpensively cook food and charge appliances. Insulating the cooking chamber allows the food to cook with a lower-power (less expensive) solar panel over a longer cooking time. We explain how using a chain of diodes instead of a resistive heater extracts...