Roadless wheel can make life easier for those who have to carry
heavy loads for distances
MASTERS student at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in
London, Ackeem Ngwenya has reinvented the wheel by doing away with the
road.
The MA + MSc student calls it the “Roadless wheel” and while the
25-year-old Malawian designed it for rural people in his home country who
transport heavy loads on their heads, his Roadless wheel can make life easier
for communities all over the world who have to carry heavy loads from distant
bus stops to their homes on footpaths, especially rural communities in
KwaZulu-Natal.
Writing on blackmanfromthesky,
the dreadlocked Ngwenya says he grew up in a remote village in Malawi with no
roads to speak of.
“It was not unusual for people to head-load in excess of 25 kg for
more than 10 km, this is the load and journey my cousins and I took to mill corn
when I was about 11,” says Ngwenya.
He says a society without transport cannot progress.
“More than 80% of Malawians live in rural areas and rely on
subsistence farming, and about 66% of them are cut off from their country’s
designated road networks, therefore inhibiting market participation and
resulting in an extreme bottleneck for economic growth and prosperity.
“And so I thought I could try to develop a means of transportation
that doesn’t require road infrastructure,” Ngwenya says,
While designing his Roadless wheel with the roads and income levels
of subsistence farmers in the Nkhata-bay district of Northern Malawi in mind, he
stresses that he is not trying to replace the car or normal pneumatic wheels.
“This should not be understood as meaning to leapfrog or bypass all
means of transport available in the region. People have access to transport if
and when they need to travel long distances and if they have enough money for
high fares and are willing to walk long distances to access them. What they do
not have and which is often overlooked are intermediate means of transport
[IMTs], i.e. moving produce from their respective villages to a point where they
would be able to get on locally available transport.
“The absences of IMTs in the villages has meant that people
necessarily rely on walking, shoulder- and head-loading as means to carry goods
within and between villages, fields, homes and market centres,” says
Ngwenya.
How it works
THE Roadless wheel
system can be adapted to suit any road condition. Instead of the fixed footprint
of a pneumatic tyre, the wheel has a network of rods attached to an axle that
can adjust like a scissor jack. The Roadless wheel is not designed to handle
high speed stresses, but built to carry heavy loads lightly over any terrain at
walking speed.
In mud, the axle is
expanded to create a high, thin tyre that can cut through the sludge. In thick
sand, the axle is tightened to expand the rods to create a fat, low tyre that
can spread the load’s pressure.
Long road ahead in terms of development
AT the time of print, Ackeem Ngwenya was still raising money on
crowd funding to take his Roadless wheel from a graduating project to
production.
He told Witness
Wheels apart from financial contributions, he has received lots of
encouragement and some people were interested in funding the future development
of the project.
“The focus for now is for me to develop a working prototype within
the financial reach of the target market so that I can pass my exam,” Ngwenya
said in an e-mail. More information on blackmanfromthesky.wordpress.com
