The Team

Kufema Zimbabwe is a citizen-led, non-profit collaboration established in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Inspired by the Shona word for “breathe“, Kufema’s mission is to save lives by building and distributing Africa-friendly open source breathing equipment (such as ventilators and CPAPs). Every breathing machine created has the potential to save lives during COVID-19 and beyond.

Kufema Zimbabwe is an active member of the COVID-19 Citizens Response roundtable, the National COVID Case Management Committee, and is working in partnership with other coordinating mechanisms to ensure efficient and effective use of resources in the joint national response. Kufema has a unique, open, online collaborative workspace, used by 650 individuals working in the broad response across Zimbabwe.

Kufema remains agile in its response to emerging priorities as COVID-19 evolves and its impact on Zimbabwe becomes known. While our specific focus may adapt to meet those needs, Kufema is firmly committed to saving lives through helping people to breathe.

The Team

Juliet

Juliet had the mad idea to start this and bring together the team. She’s got experience in epidemic prevention, social and behavior change, and mobilising movements to get things done.

Tim

Tim is a Chartered Engineer, used to designing and fixing ships, submarines, oil rigs, etc. Now an IT guy/techie/web developer here in Zim.

We’ll introduce more team members as we go along.

Teams Organisation

Our teams are divided into functional areas. The teams work within their areas and communicate via channels in Slack. The team groups are described below.

Engineering professionals

Are you a chartered engineer or equivalent in Electronics, or Bio Mechanics or similar field? I need you on Slack now please! We need to review the designs, work out production feasibility, quality assure the bill of materials, models, fabrication, etc. These are the primary tasks at the moment:

Logistics,
Specs & Regs,
Legal and QA,
Control systems design,
Pump and valve design,
Drawings and design documentation,
Modelling and simulation,
Fabrication & replication,
Overall project control.

Medical professionals

We have a Medical Advisory Board that will need support over the coming days and weeks. Our engineering team will need hour-by-hour support and guidance, and our logistics team really need your knowledge on supplies, facilities etc around the country. If you are part of the regulatory structure in Zimbabwe for medical equipment, please we need you to help the engineers

Project managers & logistics experts

Got the skills to manage and support the engineers? Please dive in, we need project managers in the areas mentioned above.

At the moment we have a bottleneck in #logistics, there is so much work involved in finding out the state of supplies and resources while we are in lockdown. Please help there if you can.

Administrators and HR

We now have such a huge team, we need administrators and personnel management professionals to come in and take leading roles.

Outreach

Can we ask all of you to get the word out? Follow us on social media channels. Share posts, talk about the project to friends and family. If you thought of someone while reading the above, get them involved if you can.

If you feel you can contribute to the project please head over to the signup form.