BYU engineering students have designed a machine that will let East African villagers generate income by squeezing oil out of coconuts.

The student team recently completed a field test in Tanzania, capping a nearly year-long problem-solving effort. The project, part of the Capstone program in the Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology, was targeted at making coconut oil production available to poor women in rural Africa.

The capstone program is a mandatory two-semester course for engineering students. Students are assigned to teams of four or five and given a problem to solve using their engineering skills, said Benjamin Hillyard. Hillyard was part of the team that designed an oven to dry the coconut meat and a press to extract the oil.

Hillyard said he was excited when he found out that he would be part of this team, not only because there was the prospect of going to Africa, but to "be able to help a lot of people."

The process for extracting coconut oil is often complicated and expensive, and the Pope Foundation wanted to find a way to allow poor African women to increase their incomes by being able to produce and sell the oil, locally or for export. The Pope Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Utah that aids economic development in African countries.

The students were challenged to create a cost-effective apparatus that would make coconut oil production easy, enabling them to drastically increase their income.

"We wanted to find a way to push the production of coconut oil down to the bottom of the economic pyramid, into the homes of rural families," said Troy Holmberg, executive director of the Pope Foundation, in a news release. "The BYU students accomplished exactly what we had hoped they would - a low-cost, robust system to produce virgin coconut oil in a rural African setting."

The team was able to take their process to Africa and demonstrate it for people in Boza, Tanzania. The Pope Foundation hopes to pilot the system to be manufactured in Africa and sold on microcredit to poor women to increase their incomes.

Solving the problem of creating a cost-effective system wasn't the only issue the team had to deal with. A few days before the team left for Africa, they discovered airline regulations wouldn't allow them to bring an oven the size of their design. Students pulled together to dismantle the oven into parts that would fit in airline regulations and would also be available in Africa.

Using parts that are available in Africa was part of the design process.

"If you give them a part that they can't buy in Africa and it breaks, they can't fix their tools," Richards said in a news release. "We successfully got everything we needed to Africa without losing anything. That was really a miracle."

The team was able to demonstrate its system. There was a learning curve during the demonstrations, Hillyard said.

"In the end, after seeing it, one woman would be able to show another [how to operate the press]," he said.

"One of the best parts was seeing the excited expressions when they first saw the oil coming out of the press," said Shara Richards, another team member, in a news release.

Hillyard said the trip was important to see how people would react to the coconut press.

"It's unheard of to have this system in homes where a few women can get together to produce oil," he said. It was important for them to see the possibilities the oil press would create for domestic use and also to generate revenue, he said. Plans are to have the presses in the hands of 100 women by the end of this year and 3,000 within five years.

"It was quite rewarding to use the knowledge I gained at BYU," Hillyard said. "It went to benefit those in need in other countries."

He said it was good to see the "application of knowledge from a BYU education help other people."

Copyright Brigham Young University 23 Jul 2008