In October 2012, a UCT mechatronics engineering professor, worried about the continued spread of shack fires plaguing the Western Cape, settled on a thesis topic for his students: 'Build a low-cost fire detector for under $1'. Student Francois Petousis took up the challenge. Encouraged by his professor and friends and spurred on by the increasing prevalence of fires, Petousis continued to work on his project past graduation. And so, the seed of an idea that would grow to become Lumkani was planted.
Over the course of the next two years, Lumkani gathered momentum. It partnered with residents of a Khayelitsha community called UT Gardens, and received a seed funding grant, made available through UCT, from the Technological Innovation Agency (TIA). By mid-November 2014, Lumkani rolled out its first pilot project of 2 000 detector systems to residents of UT Gardens. But that's just the beginning.
Through the 2014/15 festive season alone, the City of Cape Town provided fire relief to over 1 600 households, adding up to a total cost of over R12 million in the past three years.*
Anything to combat this scourge must be lauded. So how does it work?
SMS alert
Lumkani hopes to address the challenge of fires in urban informal settlements through an early warning heat detection system. Cooking, lighting and heating methods used by residents of informal settlements often produce smoke. With that in mind, Lumkani's detection unit, powered by a battery with a two-year lifespan, was designed to use 'rate-of-rise' of temperature detection to more accurately sense if a dangerous fire is about to start.
With so much of the rapid damage caused by shack fires attributable to the dense nature of urban informal settlements, Lumkani has factored this is in as a key part of the design process. As a result, the detectors have been networked within a 60-metre radius, so that the triggering of a single detector is all that's required to initiate a community-wide alarm.
Together with an SMS alert sent to Lumkani, which is able to provide the nearest fire station with a GPS location, sufficient early warning has proven essential in allowing communities to proactively prevent the spread of fires.
Since the initial rollout, the system has already detected and prevented the spread of two potentially disastrous shack fires in UT Gardens.
"It's about creating 'ecosystems of support' around risk reduction," says Emily Vining, a co-director of Lumkani. "As much as we need early detection, we need people coming in with education, prevention and corporate CSI - basically a multistakeholders' approach to creating social impact."
Key...has been the co-operation of the community.
Beside the institutional support provided by UCT and the financial backing of TIA, there's also a working partnership formed with the Community Organisation Resource Centre (CORC) and Informal Shackdwellers' Network (ISN), both of which have provided invaluable support in mobilising and rolling out the devices to the pilot communities.
"Top-down development models tend to overlook the real needs," notes Vining. "We're still constantly testing the assumption that shack fires are a huge problem in people's lives. In order to do that, you have to be close to the ground, which is why we partnered with CORC, who gave us access to communities they'd built up trusting relationships with, so we could leverage off their relationships to start building ours."
Key to this 'ecosystem of support' has been the co-operation of the community, which, through surveys and forums, has provided valuable insight that has shaped the direction Lumkani has taken.
Moving forward
With the initial rollout complete, Lumkani is now focused on monitoring and evaluation.
"We're selling more devices all the time and servicing our customers," says Vining. "This stage is really about building up the organisation's operations so we can serve our new customer base and work toward creating a great customer service experience."
Beyond this, Lumkani is investigating approaches for taking the project forward, including creating a lease-based maintenance and support package for government and working toward a second, larger rollout phase across the province and the rest of the country.
*Figures provided courtesy of the City of Cape Town, Disaster Management.
This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.
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