Some five billion people in remote and developing regions still wash their clothes by hand. It’s a task that unfairly burdens women and young girls, who can spend up to 20 hours a week on the chore.
Enter Navjot Sawhney, who founded the UK-based social enterprise The Washing Machine Project (TWMP) to tackle this, and has now shipped almost 500 of his hand-crank Divya machines to 13 countries, including Mexico, Ghana, Iraq and the US.
The Divya washing machine, made up of an outer drum and an inner one which rotates, operates a 30-minute wash cycle where it completes a 5kg load needing only a few minutes of manual turning.
