Here we are! Back to (more or less) normal after the acceleration program, where we developed the idea behind Bibak, what we need and our development milestones. I’ll give you some more details:

Landmines are a big and difficult problem in more than 60 countries around the world, when the land is affected by landmines you cannot access it in any way, it’s like is not part of your country anymore. This prevents most kind of society improvements: land cannot be cultivated, energy, food and water cannot be accessed, transportation is difficult or dangerous, there’s no land security.

We are developing the technology and creating the educational and support structure that will permit post-conflict societies to clean their surroundings from landmines, “upcycle” the same technology, and transform it in a community asset to speed up their development. That will be achieved through CANNY, a jerrycan that is composed of a modular pod of sensors, it also contains water (it’s easy to get dehydrated while demining), a first aid kit and other small tools.

I worked on the first design of Canny, you can see here a rendering and a photo of the 3d printed prototype:

CANNY can be easily deployed and its sensors use different techniques for landmines detection through a metal detector, a ground penetrating radar and an explosives sensor. This combination will permit to detect even landmines with minimum metal content or no metal parts at all. The electronic part also includes re-programmable components like microcontrollers, so it’s possible to reuse them in a wide range of applications and fields. Canny will also cost a lot less than commercially available alternatives – around 1000$.

Communities will receive training and supervision during demining and recycling, we are also putting in place a network (our first country will be Afghanistan) to help the communities when developing their land, by giving them advice, tools and resources, and market connections.

The accelerator program was Startupbootcamp HightechXL in Eindhoven, very nicely located inside the High Tech Campus, a place were you can find around 150 high tech companies in a square kilometer. That was very useful for creating a network of contacts to ensure the technological advancement of the project. During the 3 months we also developed a network outside the campus and related to investors, partners and funding channels.

Currently we’re back home and we want to create a nonprofit foundation to manage everything and offer the communities an entity to trust. We’re also working on the funding channels, we still need to get some money to get the job done from the point of view of technological development and infrastructure implementation. Our target is sustainability and in Afghanistan we should reach it after 2 years of operations.

If you have some direct contact with philanthropists, impact investors or large companies’ corporate social responsibility programs management and you think they could be interested, please help by connecting us! My contacts are on top of page (chain icon) and Bibak’s website is http://www.bibak.org.

Also I’ve been a lot more verbose than usual, but I left out tons of info on the project and landmines detection, so don’t hesitate to ask if you want more….. I will keep you posted with important news regarding Bibak (by the way, it means “Fearless” in Dari).

Thank you!