I began working on solar food drying for ECHO's East Africa Impact Center in March of 2024.  In my volunteer consultant role, I have been doing much of the work where I live near Tanga town along the coast, but I have made several trips to the East Africa Impact Center near Arusha to exchange information and collaborate.

I began my effort focusing on better understanding and improving the existing "indirect" food dryers at ECHO.  These dryers have an inclined solar collector area that feeds solar heated air into a separate enclosed drying chamber.  While working on these, and struggling to get the performance needed to reliably dry wet materials like mangos and tomatoes, I decided to also try building a "direct" dryer where the drying food is in solar heat collection space and thus exposed directly to the sun's radiation. In the very humid environment (but also sunny) at my home in Tanga (my house is just meters from the Indian Ocean), the direct dryer has performed well.  Initial construction efforts in Tanga, as well as several models built at the Impact Center, have shown that the direct dryer can be built much more cheaply than the indirect model.

Despite the advantages of cost and performance thus far, the direct collector does have the disadvantage that the drying food is exposed directly to the sun.  This will likely cause some degradation  of food quality in some instances, and will probably also overdry some material unless the dryer is carefully monitored. Thus I am also continuing to work on the indirect dryers, seeking to improve their performance and reduce the cost.  I am working with and enjoying the support of ECHO's East Africa Impact Center staff, with great direct support on the dryer work from Herry Kirimbai and Harold Msanya in the Appropriate Technology department and supporting efforts by many others.

I am creating this resource page to collect the information I have gathered and summarize progress in one place.   While I continue working on the solar dryers, there will likely be additions and revisions to this page.  If you have suggestions, questions, or other information to share feel free to contact me through my ECHO email or my personal email.  You may also contact the ECHO East Africa Impact Center team directly through contact information on their website.