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Afghan girls create ventilator with Toyota car parts

Screen Shot 2020 04 10 at 10 59 18 AM
The Afghan Dreamers work on their prototype ventilator. (Video still via The National)

In a country not known for its empowerment of women—or for its health system—five teenage girls are tackling Afghanistan’s coronavirus outbreak head-on. The girls, aged between 14 and 17, are part of an all-female robotics team that has created ventilators that run off a Toyota Corolla engine.

When the governor of Herat, in northwest Afghanistan, issued a call for more ventilators as cases rose in his city, the team, part of a group of 50 girls called the Afghan Dreamers, got cracking, according to the United Arab Emirates-based newspaper The National. The first case of coronavirus in Afghanistan was reported in Herat, on February 24. As of Thursday, the health ministry reported there are now 484 cases throughout the country. Afghanistan, however, only has 300 digital ventilators, according to Arab News, a Saudi Arabia-based English-language newspaper.

The Dreamers are the brainchild of Roya Mahboob, CEO of the Herat-based Afghan Citadel Software Company. She has been working with the five girls on the ventilator team, Somaya Faruqi, Dyana Wahbzadeh, Folernace Poya, Ellaham Mansori and Nahid Rahimi, for a year. “I work with the girls, but mostly to coordinate,” Mahboob told The National. “They are the real heroes.”

The team’s ventilators are based on ones devised by scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An MIT professor has reviewed the Dreamers’ design and told the group that it looked “clever” but that a prototype would need to be put to the test to see if it actually works.

While the idea is for the ventilators to be used only in emergency cases in which there are no other options, Mahboob explained that such cases may soon become all too frequent in her country.

“We had to be prepared for the worst situation because we do not have access to Amazon and other companies for online orders,” she told Arab News. “So, it was best to use local devices we have in our country.”

Afghan medical personnel, long faced with a serious shortage of equipment, are forced to become “de facto engineers, repairing vital solar power systems, fixing plumbing, and performing a wide range of tasks far outside their ostensible job descriptions,” according to Undark, a nonprofit science journalism magazine.

When the Dreamers started their project, they tried to find digital ventilator parts they could import from other countries, “but high costs and flight suspensions caused by the pandemic made shipments to Afghanistan impossible,” Arab News reported. Instead, the girls turned to local bazaars, where they found Toyota car parts. The cobbled-together machines will cost around $400, said the team’s spokeswoman.

Mahboob is hoping the machines will be ready for use by the end of May or June. A prototype ventilator would then need to be approved by the World Health Organization and the Afghan Public Health Ministry, Dr. Mehdi Hadid, a member of the consultative board fighting the spread of COVID-19 in Herat, told Arab News.



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Lauren Wolfe
Journalist, editor WMC Climate
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