BACK TO WEB VERSION

WINTER 2007
Bringing It All Back Home
by Rebecca McCarthy

There they were, four students and their teacher from the University of Georgia, sitting in a university president’s office in Kampala and watching an attendant bring in tea—a full British-style tea, with scones, clotted cream, cakes and finger sandwiches. One young man looked at the pastries and then stared at William Kisaalita, his engineering professor, as if he were waiting for an okay.

This student had brought from home a suitcase filled with enough beef jerky, peanut butter and other American foods to sustain him during the eight weeks he would be abroad. After all, this was Uganda—the Third World!—and he thought he couldn’t be too careful.

But those cakes. They looked delicious. The teacher motioned to the student to eat. The young man took his first taste of food prepared in Africa “and there was a transformation from fear to enjoyment,” Kisaalita said. “After that, he was ready to eat anything, to try anything.”

Kisaalita loves to tell this story. It illustrates one of his main reasons for creating a hands-on international program for UGA engineering students: to expose them to the wider world. That way, they can experience other cultures, apply their engineering skills to local people’s (particularly poor people’s) needs, and come to understand that even small-scale projects can have a large impact.

“Most of these students have never seen poor people—really poor people,” said Kisaalita. “At first there’s a sense of helplessness, but after a while that tends to wear down. They see the value of what we’re doing.”

He said that students very soon gain a sense of accomplishment and possibility, and he hopes that in the long term they will work abroad as engineers to bring technological expertise to those who most need it. If his students become engineering professors themselves, perhaps they will choose to involve their own students in projects in developing countries.

Kisaalita, 53, grew up in Nasangi, outside Kampala, in a reeds-and-mud house lit by kerosene and heated by wood. By Ugandan standards, his family was middle class. Initially, his father rode a bicycle to a government job in the capital, then bought a motorcycle and finally a car. He remembers when his family built a brick house, one of a handful in the area. He was 8.

When Idi Amin came to power in 1971, many of Kisaalita’s father’s friends—educated people who opposed the dictator—began to disappear. The Asian residents who had “kept things running” were banished, sending the country’s economy into a tailspin. Times were dreadful in Uganda.

Both Kisaalita and his younger brother, a medical student, were attending Makerere University in 1977 when students declared a strike. The police were called in, and the situation deteriorated into a riot. Students were beaten, raped, even killed. “And our parents were frantic when my brother came home late,” Kisaalita said, shaking his head. “You can imagine how worried they were. But he was all right.”

Small and wiry, Kisaalita becomes animated when he talks. He alternately gestures with his hands and holds them very still, as if he’s quieting unruly birds. He jumps up to retrieve papers, maps and photos to illustrate his stories.

The family survived the Amin years intact. Kisaalita graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. His main senior-year project was a hand-powered sugar-cane mill. Even then, he was interested in getting an invention into the hands of individual producers. A local entrepreneur was going to set up a commercial operation to do just that, but the venture fell through.

The man had been one of Amin’s cronies but had to leave the country “rather suddenly,” Kisaalita said with a smile. He left too and landed in Canada, where he earned a master’s degree in bioresource engineering in 1981 before returning to Uganda to marry Rose, his college sweetheart.

But any ideas of remaining in Africa soon vanished, he said. The country was still unstable, so the couple headed back to British Columbia, where Kisaalita received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Waterloo. His research had changed direction, he said, moving from bioresources to biomedical interests.

After several postdoc positions in Canada and the United States, Kisaalita joined UGA’s faculty of engineering in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in 1991. He began developing a three-dimensional, cell-based sensing system “that will tell pharmaceutical companies whether their drugs work or not,” he said.

While satisfying professionally and intellectually, Kisaalita’s research interests created a dilemma for him. Though none have yet been commercialized, the biosensors he is creating will benefit the middle-class—people who can afford to buy medicines produced by drug companies. What was he doing for the poor?

Kisaalita’s wife is a CPA; his four children are healthy and successful academically. He’s a full professor and a U.S. citizen with enough free time to jog around his Athens neighborhood. With such good fortune, “I had to give something back. I had to help.”

He felt especially obliged to help people like those he had grown up with, who eked out a living as best they could on $2 a day. But how? Though a native Ugandan, he had no credentials establishing him as an expert on economic development in Africa. Getting a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development or some other foreign-aid organization didn’t seem feasible, he said.

But after learning more about funding agencies, Kisaalita realized that if he could involve undergraduates in international work, support would be available. And it has been: he has received help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Science Foundation, the Engineering Information Foundation and UGA’s Vice President for Outreach.

A small grant in 2000 allowed Kisaalita to spend three months at his alma mater in Kampala, teaching and conferring with colleagues. He traveled the country in search of possible projects and set up a program to accommodate four UGA students—three from engineering and one from some other discipline. The students would be paid for their summer work, just as they are at home. The four young Americans would live in university dorms and take day trips to various sites, where they would interact with residents needing help. To give the students a sense of who they would be helping and the culture in which they’d be working, Kisaalita interviewed potential clients and videotaped their responses. Two local university students would join the team.

Kisaalita set up his international program so that it would continue functioning back in Athens, not only for the returnees but also for those who follow. For example, a group of fourth-year engineering students works on an international problem all year for their capstone project of designing and refining a machine to help “the person on the bottom,” he said.

During spring break, the senior students take their design abroad and test it, then return and write a report about possible improvements. Third-year students draw on those reports when they travel to the same country for their own summer stay.

So far, UGA students have designed three products targeting the poor: a solar-powered cooler for milk, a hand-operated nutcracker, and a solar-and-battery-powered egg incubator. The cooler will help dairy farmers in Uganda double their milk production; the nut cracker will let women in Morocco produce more Argan oil safely; and the incubator will increase the number of viable guinea fowl in Burkina Faso.

None of the three is quite finished, and Kisaalita said he doesn’t want to take on new products until one of them is “in the marketplace.” There are a few glitches to work out before they can be mass-produced and marketed at an affordable price. But various companies have expressed an interest, and Kisaalita is looking for the right match.

He has also applied for a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to build 20 to 50 incubators for Burkina Faso. Once these devices are operating successfully, he is hoping that a nongovernmental organization or a Burkina Faso solar-energy company will see the possibilities and take over production.

The milk cooler, sized to cool one large can, will safely store the milk overnight so that it can be processed the next morning. Cool Systems, a Germany company that makes beer kegs, is talking with Kisaalita about manufacturing the milk cooler.

Like his students, Kisaalita has learned what characteristics are necessary for a successful product: simple, affordable and operable by someone who can’t read. All three of the UGA machines satisfy these criteria.

But there is also the question of profitability—will they yield enough to sustain companies’ interests? “These devices are for the very poor, but there are so many of them that you can make money eventually,” Kisaalita said. “These are hard-working people who want to get ahead. They will figure out a way to pay.”

For more information contact William Kisaalita at williamk@engr.uga.edu.