Barriers to the Use of Equipment Design Methods in West Africa

Abstract

Growth in the agricultural and agri-food processing sectors is crucial to food security and economic development in West African Countries. In Burkina Faso, local equipment manufacturers play a leading role in these fields. Furthermore, equipment design methods and tools have evolved from a linear approach to parallel engineering. Indeed, they integrate major context-specific constraints such as manufacturing, maintenance, and the user's point of view. This work aims to carry out a literature review of equipment design methods and tools applied in West African Countries, and to analyze their adoption by local equipment manufacturers. This enabled us to identify the methods and tools used, and the difficulties encountered by local equipment manufacturers in adopting them. These difficulties include: the lack of training of local equipment manufacturers the unfamiliarity and complexity of the methods and tools, and above all the unsuitability of the methods for the understanding of local equipment manufacturers, since they were initially intended for design teams. As a result, we were able to envisage a design approach close to local equipment manufacturers perception. Field surveys will enable us to refine this study and formalize a new, simplified approach adapted to the perception of local equipment manufacturers.