Bomet man invents communication gadgets

Nathan Kirui adjusts his internet booster. [PHOTO: CAROLINE CHEBET/STANDARD]

KENYA: Slow Internet connection is something Nathan Kirui from Kapngetuny village, Bomet decided he was not going to live with.

The 26-year-old decided to make his own network tracking machine which resulted in reduction of time spent browsing and downloading.

“It took me nearly eight months to complete this project but I did not give up because of the vision I had,” he says.

His efforts bore fruit and today, you will find villagers thronging his village, especially students seeking to download research papers.

Kirui, who dropped out of an electrical engineering course after one semester due to lack of school fees, uses locally available materials to make the tracking machine. There is no electricity in the village so he has to use a generator to power his machine.

“With this device, downloading music or videos from the Internet takes just a few minutes if not seconds. This is nothing like the very slow yet costly Internet we had to use before,” he says.

A person within a three-metre range can access the Internet and Kirui says he hopes to expand this to cover his entire village and eventually the county.

To ease communication with his neighbours in the village, Kirui has invented yet another way of communication called ‘Radio Link’ communication.

To communicate with a neighbour, a wire connected with a hand-made receiver is connected to a radio in his house which is then linked to his neighbour’s radio which also has a receiver.

When you speak into the receiver, the radio immediately switches itself off to enable the receiver hear the message.

“This is the easiest way to communicate without charges. I have linked my mother’s radio in the kitchen with my own and we are now within easy reach of each other in case of an emergency,” he says.

Kirui hopes to expand his invention across the village so as to curb crime and to ease response time during emergencies especially at night.