Project Description
The following was a provided description of the project from the client:
Grated raw cocoyam, called Ekwang and Kwacoco Bible are staple meals in much of West and Central Africa. Traditionally, this food is prepared by manually grating cocoyam and wrapped in vegetable or banana leave. The process is labor intensive and time consuming. It can take up to 2 hours to grate cocoyam’s for a family of five. A few rich people in the cities in Africa and the diaspora have found creative ways to still eat the food by using blenders or juicers to process the food. However, mothers in rural areas still use the traditional manual method of grating the cocoyam’s and wrapping it in leaves. Preparing the food takes enormous amounts of time from women in performing other productive activities. There is a need to improve upon the process of preparing the food by designing a simple and affordable system to use to process the food. Such a system will not only help those in the villages with no electricity, but also people in the cities that have roadside restaurant that sell the food. Even the rich people in the cities will still like to use it, since it reduce their electricity consumption from using the blender to make the food. Africans in the diaspora have figured out a way to use aluminum foil to wrap the paste since it is difficult to have leaves here.
The scope of the project includes designing a dispensing device and a rolling device, with much of the focus being on the rolling device to wrap the dish. The team will specifically focus on the dish Ekwang as this has been determined by the team and the client to be the key dish to be improved upon due to the smaller nature of the rolls. The overall goal is to decrease the time it takes to roll the dish, while maintaining affordability of the system, in order to improve upon the overall process currently employed.