The Kenyan young man with the bright, lime-green shirt smiles proudly as he effortlessly spins the bicycle pedals with his hands.
The Kenyan young man with the bright, lime-green shirt smiles proudly as he effortlessly spins the bicycle pedals with his hands. A long steel rod emerges bent into a crescent-shaped semi-circle from Enoch Mogusu’s handmade apparatus.
The rods form the framework for ultra-low-cost satellite dishes that are assembled in this small workshop cramped in the middle of an entrepreneurial complex on a hill off a red dirt road.
Mogusu is the owner of Kistec Industries, which is dedicated to manufacturing low-cost satellite dishes that are made with locally available materials. These dishes can be sold to Adventist and other Christian churches at an affordable price so they may harness the power of satellites.
With the arrival of satellite technology, evangelism has changed forever. Tens of thousands can now be reached from a single location via satellite. It is now possible to present sermons by some of the most renowned preachers in the most remote areas. That is, if satellite dishes are affordable.
When satellite dishes first started popping up in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, the cost was between 150,000 to 250,000 Kenyan shillings—a luxury in a country where, according to relief groups, the per capita national income in 2001 was just under 23,000 shillings, or 340 U.S. dollars. Mogusu and his partners decided it was too much to pay.
“I said this price is relatively high,” recalls Mogusu, as he stands in front of his simple workshop. “Many churches can’t afford this, and the Adventist homes can’t afford this. So I went ahead to design a dish, which can be used for the purpose of satellite evangelism.”
Enoch and his associates started Kistec Industries in the outskirts of Kisii, which is about a four-hour drive northwest of Nairobi. He developed his first low-cost dish in 1996 using mosquito wire and other locally available materials. It was a success.
Enoch and his colleagues continued to streamline their operation. In the early days, the Kistec crew spent seven days to build one dish.
“But I thought this time is too much,” Mogusu recalls with a frown. “I went down to design a machine that could make many dishes, plus save time. So I set up a machine that can make a dish within a day—so one dish per day.”
After a little tinkering, Enoch created his own equipment from spare bicycle parts and his imagination. He designed a machine that could bend the steel rods into nearly perfect semi-circles that formed the various parts of the dish frame.
Enoch has used part determination, part ingenuity, and dedication to create a satellite dish that is more affordable, with a price tag of 9,000 Kenyan shillings. Commercial dishes can cost anywhere from 18,000 shillings for a 1.8 meter dish to 50,000 for a 2.5 meter dish.
Kistec’s dishes are not only inexpensive, they are durable and accurate. Commercial satellite dishes typically have signal strength of 55 to 65 percent, while Enoch’s satellites receive a signal of 75 to 90 percent.
The low-cost satellite dish has made the church’s satellite outreach program much easier. “Since Enoch started making cheaper equipment for satellite, more people are [able] to get satellite right in their homes,” says Sibiah Miyienda, satellite coordinator for the Adventist Church in the South Kenya region. “People can get the satellite in their hotels, in guesthouses, in some schools and also in the churches. It’s cheap now for individuals and for organizations.”
The first Adventist Church in rural Kenya bought and installed one of Enoch’s low cost satellites in July 2002. Since then, dozens of Adventist churches and schools now receive church programming via satellite.
Kistec suffered a setback recently when a fire destroyed some of its equipment, forcing Mogusu to let some of his workers go. Today he has a staff of 10, in addition to his two partners. With the mechanization of their equipment they say it is possible to manufacture 72 satellite dishes per day using three machines. Enoch believes they will soon be able to lower the price of their dishes even more because of the increase in sales they are anticipating.
Last October, Enoch had the opportunity to teach representatives from 25 African nations his technique for building inexpensive dishes. By sharing the low-cost technology he and his partners have developed, they hope more homes and churches in Africa will have access to affordable church programming.
Not satisfied with their current success, Enoch has a new vision to reach the remote areas of Kenya: mobile satellite downlink sites. It is his dream to take the dish, aim it, and with a television running off a generator, download Adventist Television Network programming for un-entered rural communities.