Cultural Influences in Women-Friendly Labor-Saving Hand Tool Designs: The Milk Churner Case

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to highlight the importance of culture in sustainable, labor-saving solutions design for women in low-resource settings. BACKGROUND: One of the reasons behind the gender asset gap among Sub-Saharan African women is the higher labor burden these women face, making it difficult for them to produce for the home and markets. Hand tools are the simplest form and therefore the best first step to address this problem. But designing women-friendly (sustainable) hand tools calls for better understanding of the low-resource settings where these women reside. METHOD: A milk churner was redesigned using a human-centered (participatory) approach with groups of women from two dominant ethnolinguistic groups of Bantu and Nilotic of Uganda, and its usability was tested. RESULTS: The churner reduced labor up to eightfold and has potential to expand the range of uses to include children and husbands due to its simplicity. Also, the churner significantly reduced undesirable health effects, like pain in knee joints. Based on the experience with the churner, a six-item “survival guide” is proposed to complement human-centered design guiding principles for facilitating the generation of solutions in low-resource settings. CONCLUSION: By paying great attention to culture in relation to human factors, a labor-reducing churner has been successfully introduced among Ugandan women. The ultimate goal is to make the churner available to female smallholder dairy-farming households throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. APPLICATIONS: This study provides a survival guide for generating solutions to problems from low-resource settings.