Profile

I’m from Ireland and currently living in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, in East Africa. I live with 8 other employees so we have a full house, and we plan lots of weekend adventures together. Work is Mon-Fri followed by gym/yoga/climbing/socialising. There’s always something going on!

I love sewing and recently made myself a yoga bag. I play the alto sax but also had to leave that behind in Ireland. I love Monty Python (very old and very silly comedy show) and going to concerts & music festivals. I’m also crazy about the outdoors and love getting out of the city at weekends. There are so many beautiful places to see here! We done a few hikes, mountain biking through a nearby forest, swam in the Indian ocean, and been on safari!

My company makes clean cookstoves here in Nairobi. Customers use these stoves for cooking meals & boiling water instead of using a regular cooker. Like a camping cookstove but better! Our stove is very efficient so the customer spends less money buying charcoal every day, and also they inhale less smoke every time they use it. All the stoves are made here in Kenya and the company employs over 100 local people, including over 50% women.

Later this year we are launching another product, a wood stove. This is more popular in the countryside where people don’t use charcoal as much. Our stove will mean that they use less wood, so they will chop down less trees, helping the environment.

The next step is to produce even cleaner stoves which run on ethanol. bio/kerosene and agricultural waste.

My job is on the Design team. I spend a lot of time drawing up models in 3D CAD software, and I make prototypes in the factory when we’re trying out new designs. This means lots of metal work at times – cutting with an angle grinder, welding, using the rivet gun, rolling metal sheets, drilling. I didn’t have much experience of that before here so I’m really enjoying learning lots of new skills!

I also have to do a bit outside the factory at times – we help Market Research with Focus Groups (testing out new products / changes with a group of people and examining the results), and also Pilot Studies (sending new products out to people’s homes for a few weeks as a trial run). And I often have meetings with partner companies as well. 

The work is really varied and very exciting. If anyone on the team has an idea we have a chat about it & brainstorm to try make it work or improve it. There are so many possibilities when you work in design! And it’s so good to know that the work we do is improving day to day life for every customer. Saving them money and improving their health.