In The World: A better way to beat around the bush
Many residents of New Longoro, a small village in the countryside of Ghana, are small-scale farmers, and one of the crops they grow is groundnuts — what we call peanuts. But harvesting and processing the nuts is a long and labor-intensive process, and the hardest part is the threshing — scraping the uprooted plants to release the pods containing the nuts. A better, faster way to thresh the nuts could enable each farmer to grow more of them and get them to market faster, thereby boosting their incomes. That was one of a dozen projects worked on by the 70 participants in this year's International Design and Development Summit (IDDS), a month-long collaboration that brings together people from around the globe to build technologies for communities in the developing world. By the conclusion of this year's summit, which was held in Kumasi, Ghana's second-largest city, the team of five...