A fridge for the developing world

Picture by: flickr/Graham Elle

According to the Hunger Free Campaign, the Nigeria’s Statistics Bureau estimates that a third of the country’s 140 million people go to bed hungry every night.

Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Mohammed Bah Abba has invented an innovative earthenware cooling system to preserve perishable foods in developing countries with arid climates. As a Nigerian teacher, Mohammed was motivated by his concern for the rural poor and by his interest in indigenous African technology to develop practical, local solutions to rural problems. His simple and inexpensive earthenware “pot-in-pot” cooling device, based on a simple physical principle and used as far back as ancient Egypt, is revolutionizing lives in this semi-desert area of Nigeria.