Women in the coastal Tanzanian village of Boza make about $2 a day. But a group of Brigham Young University engineering students is helping them realize the earning potential of a natural resource that's all around them: the ubiquitous coconut.

"It was pretty cool to combine the engineering process with helping people around the world," she said. "That's all the more exciting: knowing that the people implementing this will be going out there and being entrepreneurs and making a huge difference."

The project started back in September with four students. The challenge was issued by the Pope Foundation, which owns a coconut oil processing plant in Kenya just north of the Tanzanian border, to develop a means to extract the oil in a home setting. The students spent months designing a process that would be simple and cheap enough for African women to do on their own, said project faculty adviser Terri Bateman. The conventional process takes two days and requires heavy factory machinery.

"They generated like 100 different concepts for how to extract oil from coconuts and narrowed it down to this one basic design," she said. "They wanted to design something that could be produced locally in Africa. That was a big challenge."

But working from facilities in Provo and Orem proved to be tough in its own right, Bateman said. One of the biggest challenges for the group was simply tracking down the coconuts here to test the process.

"Most places only sell like three to five coconuts at once," she said. "They just don't have them."

Eventually, one group member found a Web-based service that shipped them dried coconut meat, which just had to be rehydrated before it was used.

The group worked with a price ceiling of $500 per unit to make sure they would be affordable in Africa. Richards said that was a significant departure from most engineering assignments that she's worked on.

"It was really surprising, because we were expecting that we were going to design a new manufacturing system or a new program or something like that," she said. "They specifically said, 'We want this as simple as possible.' "

What they ended up with was a two-part process that will ultimately only cost $150 to purchase. First, the coconuts are cracked open and the meat culled from inside. Using a basic brick or adobe oven, the shells are burned inside and the meat is "stir-fried" on top, Bateman said. When it's dry enough, it's placed into a cylinder and pressed. Small holes in the cylinder secrete the oil for collection.

Richards, Bateman and three other students traveled to Boza in May to introduce the technology to villagers and train them to use it. During a 12-day visit, Richards said she was surprised by the enthusiasm with which the process was greeted.

"It was really amazing to see all of these intelligent, amazing people who are just working and trying to boost their own economy," she said.

The students demonstrated how to build the ovens and then supervised villagers as they constructed their own. When they returned to the United States, they left behind one press and pictorial instructions with the village. Richards said watching the villagers' reactions when the first batch of oil was produced made for one of the best parts of the trip.

"As soon as the oil came out, all of the ladies said 'ooh' and 'ahh,' " she said. "That was incredibly exciting."

While the original idea was for each press to inspire a "microfranchise" that would sell the oil to local markets, that's no longer the plan, said Troy Holmberg, executive director of the Pope Foundation. Facing questions of whether there is enough demand locally for the women to sell the oil themselves, Pope employees will instead make a weekly run to villages using the presses and buy the oil for distribution abroad.

Holmberg said the technology has also been tweaked from the students' initial design, but remains functionally the same. Now, a five-woman team can purchase the equipment for $350 and produce 10-12 liters of oil a day.

When Pope buys it back at $3 a liter, the profits represent a big financial increase for most of the women, he said.

"The women can kind of focus on producing it; they don't have to worry about selling it," he said.

To purchase the systems, Pope will provide microcredit loans, Holmberg said. That method had already helped several Africans find ways to bump up their earnings from around 50 cents a day to $2 or $3, he said.

Holmberg said the Kenyan factory is producing the coconut presses and will begin rolling them out in August. He hopes to have 100 women employed by December, and if all goes well, several thousand in the future.

• Ace Stryker can be reached at 344-2556 or at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it