Your Situation Report for Monday 30 March

Wow! What a week, well 6 days. Going from an idea to a team of nearly 600 volunteers, plus 200 donors and other amazing contributors.

We are all working hard on the design, build, management, logistics, financing, promoting of the Kufema Zimbabwe project.

This entirely voluntary and open source project is getting organised, reviewing designs, finding materials and components, supporting other projects. Our 3D-printer team are itching to go…

Objectives

Our primary objective is to help people in need to breathe in Zimbabwe. This has 3 areas that we want to concentrate on:

  1. Building open source ventilators and respirators using the most appropriate design available for Zimbabwe.
  2. Repairing, rebuilding and refurbishing existing breathing equipment in country.
  3. Supporting the PPE (personal protection equipment – masks, gloves, gowns, etc.) projects already running in Zimbabwe.

This means doing what it takes to support our medical system and personal to the best of our ability.

We need you

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:

  1. Logistics,
  2. Specs & Regs,
  3. Legal and QA,
  4. Control systems design,
  5. Pump and valve design,
  6. Drawings and design documentation,
  7. Modelling and simulation,
  8. Fabrication & replication,
  9. 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 the 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.

You are the One!

Get out there, get the information, come join the team, share, talk and get things done. We will get coordinators for each channel, let us know by DM in there if you want to be one.

The team

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

Tim is an 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!

You

We are building the team and inviting people to the Slack channel (where we will have most of our comms) as we process them. Please log in and say hello when we send you an invite. Please be patient as I process all the applications. 

Thank you all again.

Stay safe out there,

Tim & Juliet