Case study
Design Outreach
An Ohio nonprofit had a fix for a problem across sub-Saharan Africa. We went to five districts to find out how to sell it.
The problem
Design Outreach is an engineering nonprofit in Gahanna, Ohio. They had spent years field-testing a small steel part that fits inside hand pumps already in the ground — Afridev and India Mark II, the two designs most of rural sub-Saharan Africa drinks from. By their own account, around 200 million people depend on roughly 700,000 of these pumps, and up to 30% are out of service at any given moment.
The part worked. That was never the problem.
The problem was that it is a length of metal nobody can photograph, and everything it does is a thing that doesn’t happen — a pump that doesn’t break, a walk that doesn’t get longer. So before anything was made, we went and asked. Five districts in rural Malawi, finding out how the people who live with these pumps actually see them.
Before anything was made
Positioning and naming
An engineering product name that specifiers could use and nobody else could repeat, simplified into a proposition that survives being said out loud.
Field research
Five rural districtsFive rural districts, on the ground. Audience personas and what actually drives them; interviews to test the assumptions rather than confirm them; and the word associations people were already using for these pumps, taken straight into the advertising.
What we made
The animated launch film
2 minTwo minutes, showing the failure, the part, and the difference — so a specifier could see the mechanism instead of reading about it.
The documentary
8 min · English, ChichewaThe product in use at Dzaleka refugee camp, filmed as a record rather than a pitch — for the people who needed evidence before they needed persuading.
The training videos
9 min · English, ChichewaFor the people who actually fit the part. The same job as the installation guides, for anyone who would rather be shown than read.
The print and GTM kit
Flyers, brochures, installation guides, posters, billboards, and hand-painted shop signage. Built for a market where the argument has to survive without power, bandwidth or a screen.
National radio
Currently running. The one channel that reaches the households using these pumps, in a market where a screen is not a given.
Across all of it: localized and translated into Chichewa and Portuguese.
“Most of what we thought was right, but the things the research corrected were important.”
Outcome
Within ten months of the November 2025 launch, MaxLife Centralisers have expanded across the same five districts the research covered, built recognition in the market, and entered two new countries.
Design Outreach reports that the part reduces pump breakdowns by 70–80%, and that their work now reaches more than 480,000 people across six countries.