Work · Case study
Design Outreach
A product launch in rural Malawi for a US engineering non-profit. We researched it in five districts, then made the film, the documentary, the training videos, the print and the radio, all in Malawi.
2025–26
The problem
Design Outreach had spent years field-testing a steel part that fits inside hand pumps already in the ground.
The part worked. That was never the problem.
The problem was a launch: a part nobody can photograph, whose whole benefit is a breakdown that does not happen, sold to people the client had never met.
The scale+
Design Outreach is an engineering non-profit in Gahanna, Ohio. By its own account, around 200 million people depend on roughly 700,000 Afridev and India Mark II hand pumps, and up to 30% are out of service at any given moment.
The launch, in order
01Field researchFive rural districts, on the ground.+
Personas for each audience, interviews set up to test our assumptions, and the words people already used for these pumps. The advertising used those words.
02Positioning and namingA proposition people can repeat.+
The product had an engineering name that was hard to repeat. We simplified it into a proposition people can say aloud.
03The animated launch filmTwo minutes.+
The failure, the part and the difference. It was made for donors, NGOs and decision makers in rural water supply, who needed to see how the part works.
04The documentaryEight minutes, English and Chichewa.+
The product in use at Dzaleka refugee camp, filmed as a record for people who needed evidence before persuasion.
05The training videosNine minutes, English and Chichewa.+
For the technicians who fit the part, and to help the people who use the pumps adopt it.
06The print kitDown to hand-painted shop signage.+
Flyers, brochures, installation guides, posters and billboards, made for a market where the pitch has to work without power, bandwidth or a screen.
07National radioWhere a screen is not a given.+
The channel that reaches the households using these pumps. Running to December 2027.
All of it localised into Chichewa and Portuguese.
Outcome
Within ten months of the November 2025 launch, MaxLife Centralisers had expanded across the same five districts the research covered and built recognition in the market.
Design Outreach report that the part reduces pump breakdowns by 70–80%, and that their work now reaches more than 480,000 people across six countries.
More work
Launches in Malawi, and work for clients in the UK, the EU and the US.