When life gives you sunshine, make hearing aids!

 

 

Stewart holds up a solar charger for renewable batteries at his photo-lined convention booth. Photo by Alyce Henson/Rotary Images.

Many things are in short supply in parts of Africa: antibiotics, electricity, specialized medical care, and vocational training for the disabled, to name just a few. Add up all those shortages, and you get plenty of preventable diseases, unemployment, and poverty.

But when you take one thing Africa has much of – sunshine – and add an environmentally friendly philosophy, you’ll find a palm-size solution to at least one of the developing world’s common problems: deafness. It’s a solar-powered hearing aid that melds advanced technology with simple design. At night, the user just plugs its tiny batteries into a charger that’s been sitting in the sun all day, collecting power. By morning, the hearing aid is ready for use.

Rotarian Irwin F. Stewart, a retired Canadian surgeon who specialized in otolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat medicine) showed the devices at the 2007 RI Convention in Salt Lake City. About 2,500 of them have been distributed to hearing-impaired people in Uganda and Zimbabwe since 1993-94, when Stewart headed up a Matching Grant project while serving as governor of District 5040 in New Westminster, B.C.

Through a partnership with other clubs, a series of Matching Grants, and a Health, Hunger and Humanity Grant, the hearing program has expanded. It now includes training missions to teach African medical personnel the diagnostic procedures and surgical techniques that can reverse hearing loss.

The project boosts employment too. Costing about US$65 each, the solar hearing aids are manufactured in Botswana by people with disabilities who have “good eyes, hand-eye coordination, and brains,” said Stewart, of the Rotary Club of New Westminster. And more jobs are generated in other areas because the plastic pieces that fit in users’ ears need to be sized and custom made on-site.

The solar chargers and renewable batteries, which last around two years, cost about $25; the total price for a hearing aid and the necessary equipment is about $100. Stewart compared that with the approximately $3,000 it can take to purchase one conventional hearing aid and a year’s supply of batteries. Cost aside, traditional hearing aids can be difficult to use in areas of Africa where electricity and batteries are in short supply.

The idea was developed by a group of Canadian business school graduates who had traveled to Africa as part of a training program, Stewart said. The devices are produced by Godisa Technologies Trust, which is owned by Camphill, a nongovernmental organization based in Scotland. The name Godisa was chosen, Stewart said, because in Botswana it means “to help someone.”

Stewart drew parallels between the situation in many parts of Africa today and that in North America in the 1920s, when antibiotics were not yet a standard treatment for ear infections, which can lead to burst eardrums, especially among toddlers.

Many hearing-impaired children in Africa don’t learn to speak, so they often are deemed unintelligent and excluded from schools. Even those who are diagnosed, usually around age 10, frequently grow up to live marginalized, silent lives.

In contrast, hearing-impaired students who use the solar-powered devices typically learn a trade – usually woodworking and mechanics for the boys, sewing, crocheting, and dressmaking for the girls. The extra productivity is a bonus to local economies.

And then there’s the priceless payoff. In an attempt to describe what it feels like to witness a person hearing clearly for the first time, Stewart, the hearing specialist, becomes silent. He stands up from his chair, walks over to a wall in his convention booth, and points to a photo of a beaming child.