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Michael Makuza, Chronicle Reporter
RESEARCH shows that power cuts affect studies and have a long-term negative impact on educational growth and governments in Southern Africa, one of the regions with a power deficit.
However, students at Bulawayo’s Maranatha Adventist High School are an impatient lot — they have pimped up pens with a torch to enable them to study and do homework in the dark.
The 25-member group consists of juniors and Lower Sixth students.
After extensive research, the Maranatha students, who formed a company and named it Brightlight in May this year, found out that most pupils are failing to study at night due to load shedding and made it their mission to find a solution and they found it in the form of a pimped-up pen with a lighting system.
“According to statistics of O-levels last year, about 75 percent of the candidates failed and some of the reasons was that they had limited time to study such that some of them are experiencing load shedding and some of them don’t have electricity and not all of those families can afford torches and phones. We then decided to bring the Brightlight company pen which has an inbuilt battery, and an inbuilt switch where you can turn it on and be able to read or do anything you want,” said Anele Khumalo, the Brightlight chief executive officer.
Brightlight chief operating officer, Kudzwaishe Mukondiwa said the making of the pen was no easy task.
“After having thought of our idea, we realised that it was something which was really small but needed a lot of labour, so before we actually dived into creating it, we first surveyed the strengths of all the members who were part of our team.
After having surveyed their strengths and weaknesses we then divided them into three different categories, which are three different stages of production with the first stage being the primary stage of production, the second being the secondary stage of production and the third being the tertiary stage of production.
“For the primary stage of production, we realised that the raw materials, which we needed to create our product, we needed things which were going to help the community and all the people who were actually creating this product form so we then surveyed all the materials we needed to make sure before we create the product, we have all the materials which are safe for the person who will use the product.”
The team decided to use LED bulbs as they don’t consume too much power like other bulbs.
Kudzwaishe said: “We also decided to get a battery which was going to last for a very long time for as much as the pen and the ink was going to last.
After that we decided that instead of spending all our money on buying all the raw materials, we decided that for the barrels we are going to collect it through the clean-up campaigns. We would go around picking up the barrels and we would reuse them to create our product.”
Brightlight marketing director, Prudence Gedeon said while their target market were students, the pen is also available to anyone who wants it.
“We managed to advertise our product on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and on those platforms, we have many likes and followers so we managed to reach a wider market share. On the pricing strategy we used a strategy called cost plus pricing where we consider two variables which are total cost of production and our profit margin. So, the pen costs US$8.
“We adopted this strategy because our product is still new in the market so consumers want to explore something which is new in the market. Our pen has become a buzz in the market, if you are in need of our pen, Brightlight company is the go-to company,” said Prudence.
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