I dream of a world where unpaid labour does not disproportionately affect women. My vision is to live in a world where everyone has access to a washing solution that limits the burden of handwashing clothes.
I was on a sabbatical taking a break from my engineering career in the UK, building cookstoves in the dusty Tamilian village in India called Kallipalayam where I became accustomed to limited electricity and water accessibility. My neighbour, a lady called Divya spent up to 20 hours per week hand washing her entire family’s clothes – a task that added significantly to her time spent participating in unpaid labour as well as contributed to the acquisition of her chronic health issues like backache and cracked skin. I was shocked to witness her plight.
From my research, I found that 70% of the world’s population doesn’t have a washing machine. The task of hand-washing laundry is disproportionately placed on women. instead of self-care, education, childcare, or work, many spend 2 working days-per-week on this task. I thought there must be something I could do and set my mind to finding a solution. That is when I came up with the idea of designing, developing, and distributing low-cost, water-saving, manual washing machines to provide marginalised people like “Divya” with an alternative to hand-washing clothes. Thus, The Washing Machine Project (TWMP) was born.
After coming back to the UK in 2017, I formed a team and put my head together with fellow engineers, anthropologists, and data scientists, and we created a prototype, named after Divya. The start-up has not been easy, but my team of volunteers who work tirelessly to make this project a success are the real heroes. TWMP seeks to address gender inequality. unpaid domestic labour, water scarcity and several health-related issues regarding hand-washing clothes.
In 2019, TWMP conducted initial primary research in 6 countries in the global south and successfully tested a prototype of a manual washing machine in Iraqi refugee camps in partnership with Oxfam and Care-International and received phenomenal feedback.
We aim to launch our final product ($ 35) in the market by 2022. Our mission is to alleviate the burden of handwashing felt predominantly by women and girls in developing countries. I owe it to Divya and all the women I speak to around the world that are asking for this kind of innovation and that is what makes me unstoppable.
United Kingdom 