NURTURING LOCAL ENTREPRENEURS
FOLLOW UP AND PROGRESS OF MULAT BASAZINEW FENTE, NO-TOUCH HAND WASHING STATION DESIGN COMPETITION WINNER.
Following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, public awareness campaigns resulted in a growing demand for household and institutional handwashing stations. In Ethiopia, it is estimated that 92% of the population (about one hundred million people) lacks access to basic handwashing necessities such as clean water and soap (UNICEF/WHO JMP, 2019). A rapid market assessment conducted by USAID Transform WASH (T/WASH) revealed that few affordable handwashing stations exist in the market. To address this gap, T/WASH partnered with the Federal Ministry of Health to organize a national design competition to find affordable, no-touch industrial designs for handwashing stations.
After receiving fifty-nine design concepts and specifications that fulfilled the essential criteria of affordability and scalability, the project team pulled together a diverse group of professionals to dedicate two full days reviewing the technical and financial proposals. Eight of the best candidates were selected after two rounds of screening. In November 2020, T/WASH organized a pitch session in Addis Ababa for the best eight candidates to present their designs to a panel of judges, media outlets, and relevant stakeholders. The top two finalists were selected for household and institutional handwashing station designs, respectively. This is the story of, Mulat Basazinew Fente, the hand wash design competition winner.
Mulat is a multi-talented entrepreneur and the owner of Mulat Industrial Engineering PLC, a family-owned manufacturing business in Bahir Dar founded in 1960. Mulat Industrial Engineering specializes in large boats, farming tools, machinery, and furniture. His line of work was inspired by his father, Ato Basazinew, who owned a similar facility on a smaller scale. He furthered his skills in industrial engineering by working on industrial products in Holland, specializing in boat construction, and went on to work on Ethiopia’s first tourist boat. However, Mulat’s work does not stop there; he is a passionate innovator with multiple patents for water pumps, farm seed drilling machines, and industry parking solutions.
Mulat first saw the T/WASH no-Touch handwashing design competition on Ethiojobs.net. As an innovator, Mulat wanted to know if he could propose a solution to handwashing products during the COVID outbreak. “Despite the difficulty of finding raw materials and inflation, I wanted to see what I could do to create more innovative products,” he told us.
Mulat’s innovation is a simple-to-use, locally produced, valve-based, foot-operated tap that can be fixed on 5 to 20-liter jerrycans. The product is suitable for household settings and can easily be mass-produced, including at small-scale workshops, without heavy reliance on imported raw materials in rural communities. In addition, the product is durable and only costs six hundred birr in retail.
After winning the competition, T/WASH supported Mulat by organizing a co-design session with skilled participants including engineers and fiberglass designers at the TVET vocational college in Bahir Dar to refine his product. In addition, Adama Science and Technology College provided technical assistance by putting his engineering design on paper. Furthermore, Mulat received support to manufacture one hundred no-touch handwashing products for market testing and procurement after he finalized production. He established a production line to produce one hundred batches of items and distributed them to selected distributors in Amhara and the Somali regions for market testing.
Mulat is at an early stage of scaling up his product. Still, he is proud to have won the competition and received marketing and product refining support from USAID Transform WASH. He is currently working with the Amhara Regional Bureau and T/WASH to promote his product and increase sales.
