A local invention designed to prevent shack fires from escalating into infernos has won an international competition for innovation.
The prize money of $75 000 (about R950 000) will hopefully be enough to turn Lumkani’s fire-detection device into a commercial success and see it installed in shacks throughout the country.
Its inventors believe it could eventually be sold around the world for informal settlements, where fires can cause death and devastation in a flash.
Lumkani was one of five overall winners in The Venture, a competition run by Chivas Regal to reward the next big idea in social enterprise. Lumkani’s entrepreneurs won an initial round in South Africa, earning $50 000 in prize money. Then they competed against 14 other winners from around the world in San Francisco.
“It’s incredible to be selected as a finalist for The Venture, among some of the brightest young entrepreneurs in the social enterprise sector,” said managing director David Gluckman. “We are very proud to represent Africa. This is a big win for us; we can start rolling out bigger parts of our business model, which require more capital, test new strategies and really scale our sales and marketing across the country, continent and world.”
Their funds are also being boosted by a crowdfunding campaign on indigogo.com, which has brought in donations of $96 400.
“All of a sudden there’s a lot of pressure to do something with it,” says director Paul Mesarcik. “We have exciting results from pilot studies and we have a device that we know can make an impact. The challenge is to get it to as many people as possible.”
That will involve educating people about the benefits and persuading them to spend R120 on a device that might be a grudge purchase.
“You can’t just take a new piece of technology and drop off boxes and say, ‘Now you are protected,’” Mesarcik says. “We want to figure out strategies to use the money we have won to develop new devices and ways to get them out to people, which is the real challenge. It’s not difficult to invent something, the challenge is to make it work.”
Lumkani’s device is the world’s first networked heat detector. It uses heat detection, rather than smoke detection, since heating and cooking equipment used in informal settlements is often smoky by nature. Once it detects heat rising too rapidly it sounds an alarm.
“If you don’t switch it off within 20 seconds, it triggers all the neighbouring alarms within a 60m radius, which in a township settlement is a huge amount of houses,” Mesarcik says.
As a third safety level, the alarm has a solar-powered internet gateway that sends an alert by SMS to community leaders. It can also be set to alert disaster management services and send the GPS co-ordinates of the device that triggered the alarm.
“We are dealing with the needs of the most underserved people in the world and preventing fires that they experience every day,” Mesarcik says. “They don’t know if today is the day they are going to lose everything they have in a fire that isn’t even their fault.”
About 2 000 have been sold so far. To get more devices into the market, the directors are negotiating with charities and companies to subsidise them. For further information, see www.lumkani.com