During my first week in Kenya, I had the opportunity to explore Nairobi, spend time with my roommates, and meet the incredible employees of the Drop Access medical device startup company. I am living in an apartment with 2 other students, Emma and Colin, who are in the same Rice Master of Bioengineering GMI program as me. None of us had traveled to Africa before, but we were determined to find our way around town. The world beyond our apartment looks like an urban jungle, complete with monkeys scurrying across an abandoned parking deck, trees of all shapes and sizes fighting for space along the side of the road, and partially built skyscrapers dotting the horizon. During our first weekend together, we picked up groceries at the Carrefour supermarket in the Sarit Center mall, worked up a sweat at the AfroFit Gym, and walked through a maze of stores and food courts on our way to lunch at the Orchid Persian restaurant in the Village Market shopping mall. As we commuted through the city, we quickly learned that people in Nairobi are friendly, but drivers and motorcyclists are merciless. Crossing intersections was an extreme sport. There are no marked lanes for the vehicles, no one uses their turn signal, the streets are jam packed with giant buses and weaving motorcycles, dozens of pedestrians dart through traffic, and roadside vendors constantly pace between vehicles. Miraculously, we didn’t witness any car accidents in this organized chaos. After getting a taste of life in Kenya, I was hungry for more and eager to meet the Drop Access team I will work with for the rest of this summer.
Lunch at Village Market with Emma and Colin
During my first day as a Drop Access intern, I attended my onboarding presentation, toured the Drop Access warehouse, received safety training, introduced myself to key team members, and saw how their flagship product, the VacciBox, is assembled. The HR representative explained that Drop Access’ mission is to manufacture and distribute clean energy systems, their vision is to provide sustainable clean energy to underserved communities in Africa by developing and deploying solar-powered refrigeration systems, and they are team of people who value innovation, honesty, customer centered product design, quality products, and eco-friendly solutions. My first meeting with Drop Access CEO Norah Magero left me feeling welcomed, well informed, and curious to see what challenges I could help the production team overcome in the upcoming weeks. She enlightened me to the global nature of Drop Access, the types of vaccines stored in VacciBox, the successes and challenges of working with employees and contractors in Kenya, India, and the UK, and some upcoming goals for the company. After discussing my technical skills and interests, Norah directed me to production team members who would work with me to manufacture an improved VacciBox that is solar powered, connected to a temperature monitoring system, lightweight, and capable of maintaining an internal temperature between 2 to 8 degrees Celsius for more than 4 hours when the fridge is not connected to electricity. This information packed morning had a sweet ending because my coworker Perpetual invited everyone to the break room to celebrate her birthday and eat red velvet cake. As we sang her happy birthday and she blew out the candles, I saw how these employees are from different academic and career backgrounds, but are united in a common goal of creating a quality product in a supportive work environment.
Over the past two days, the Drop Access production team helped me access various VacciBox engineering documents, showed me which online weekly meetings I needed to attend, identified what CAD software I needed to install on my laptop, and explained I would help to redesign the VacciBox lid. The current VacciBox is not able to maintain the internal temperature for the target number of hours. Installing a different type of gasket or changing the shape of the refrigerator lid could help to create a tighter seal between the lid and main compartment of the fridge, preventing cold air from escaping the storage compartment. I also learned how other members of the production team were prototyping a VacciBox monitoring solution that would be installed in Turkana County hospitals. This wireless monitoring solution will be mounted on the wall above each VacciBox and collect data from the temperature sensor inside each refrigerator. This data will then be uploaded to a website, allowing Drop Access and their customers to easily see the temperature of the fridge throughout all hours of the day. This will also help Drop Access to identify which fridges are having technical failures and better assist customers on how to repair their unit. As I began to collect market research on different fridge gasket designs, I began to realize that VacciBox requires several modifications and enhancements, but it is an affordable, durable product that can change the game for hospitals struggling to provide their patients with quality vaccines during power outages. In next week’s blog, I will tell you all about the fun things I did during Kenya’s Madaraka holiday weekend and what progress I’ve made on my VacciBox projects. Thanks for reading and have a great day!
VacciBox monitoring solution prototype