Project index
100 field-tested plans. Filter by what you can afford, what you can already do, and what you can actually get hold of nearby.
100 plans
Manual Compressed Earth Block Press
A hand-built compound-lever press that turns local soil into load-bearing building blocks for about the price of a bag of cement.
Rammed Earth Wall with Reusable Formwork
Tamp moist sub-soil in timber shuttering to raise thick, thermally massive walls that stay cool through the hottest afternoon.
Concrete Biosand Water Filter
A household slow-sand filter in a concrete body that removes most pathogens and turbidity with no power, no cartridges and no ongoing cost.
Rooftop Rainwater Harvesting with First-Flush Diverter
Catch and store roof runoff, and throw away the dirty first few litres automatically so what reaches your tank is worth storing.
Insulated Brick Rocket Stove
A J-shaped combustion chamber that burns small sticks hot and nearly smoke-free, cutting cooking fuel by half or more.
Lever-Arm Charcoal Briquette Press
Press agricultural waste and charcoal dust into burnable briquettes, turning a disposal problem into cooking fuel or a product to sell.
Keyhole Garden with Central Compost Basket
A raised circular bed fed and watered from a compost basket at its centre — high yield on poor soil with very little water.
Gravity Drip Irrigation from a Raised Barrel
A 200 L drum on a stand feeds drip lines by gravity alone, cutting garden water use by around 60% with no pump.
Indirect Solar Food Dryer
A timber cabinet with a glazed heat collector that dries fruit, vegetables and fish faster and cleaner than open sun, without bleaching the produce.
Cold-Process Soap from Local Oils
Turn shea butter, palm or coconut oil into hard bar soap you can use at home or sell — a reliable first micro-enterprise product.
Tippy Tap Handwashing Station
A foot-operated hands-free handwashing station built from a jerrycan, sticks and string — runs on a fifth of the water of a tap.
Ferrocement Water Storage Tank
A wire-mesh and mortar shell that stores 5,000 litres for a fraction of the price of an imported plastic tank, built entirely on site.
Sun-Dried Adobe Brick Yard
Mould and sun-cure mud bricks in the open with nothing but soil, straw, water and a timber mould — the cheapest wall material there is.
Cob Bread and Pizza Oven
A domed earth oven on a raised base that holds baking heat for hours from one small fire of scrap wood.
Lime and Earth Plaster for Earthen Walls
A breathable three-coat render that protects mud, adobe and earth-block walls from rain without trapping moisture the way cement does.
Bamboo Truss Roof Frame
A treated bamboo truss and purlin frame that spans small buildings for a fraction of the cost of sawn timber or steel.
Silver-Treated Ceramic Pot Water Filter
A fired clay pot filter that removes bacteria and protozoa at roughly two litres an hour, sitting in a covered bucket with a tap.
SODIS Solar Water Disinfection Rack
Clear PET bottles on a black-painted roof rack, using six hours of sun to make biologically safe drinking water at no running cost.
Hand-Dug Well with Concrete Ring Lining
Cast concrete rings on the surface, sink them as you dig, and finish with a sealed apron so the well does not contaminate itself.
Rope-and-Washer Pump
A hand-cranked loop of rope with rubber washers that lifts water up to about 35 metres, built almost entirely from salvage.
Batch Solar Water Heater from a Salvaged Tank
A black-painted tank in a glazed, insulated box that gives hot washing water by mid-afternoon with no pump, controller or electricity.
Improved Mud Cookstove with Fuel Shelf
A moulded clay-and-sand stove with a sized combustion chamber and pot skirt that cuts firewood use by roughly a third against a three-stone fire.
Retained-Heat Basket Cooker
An insulated basket that finishes cooking beans, rice and stews off the fire, cutting fuel for long-boil foods by half or more.
Plywood Solar Box Cooker
A glazed, insulated box with a hinged reflector that reaches 120 – 150 °C and cooks a full pot of food on sunlight alone.
Floating-Drum Biogas Digester
A dung-fed digester with a floating gas holder that supplies two to three hours of cooking gas a day from a few animals' manure.
Treadle Pump for Smallholder Irrigation
A foot-powered twin-cylinder pump that lifts shallow groundwater or river water for a quarter-hectare plot without any fuel.
Zai Pits and Stone Contour Bunds
Hand-dug planting pits and stone lines along the contour that catch runoff and rebuild crusted, degraded soil into cropland.
Vermicompost Bin from Stacked Crates
A shaded worm bin that turns kitchen scraps into high-value castings and liquid feed, using stacked crates and a drain tap.
Movable Chicken Tractor
A floorless, lightweight coop you shift daily so birds get fresh forage, the ground gets manured, and nobody has to muck out.
Hand-Cranked Maize Sheller
A simple drum-and-plate sheller that strips maize cobs several times faster than hand shelling, without bruising the grain.
Zeer Pot-in-Pot Evaporative Cooler
Two clay pots with wet sand between them, dropping the inner temperature by 10 – 15 °C and keeping vegetables saleable for days instead of hours.
Arborloo Shallow-Pit Compost Toilet
A shallow pit toilet with a movable slab and superstructure — fill it, cap it with soil, plant a tree on it and dig the next one.
Ventilated Improved Pit Latrine
A lined pit latrine with a dark interior and a screened vent pipe that pulls odour out and traps flies — the standard upgrade from an open pit.
Earthbag Wall & Dome
Fill polypropylene bags with damp sub-soil, tamp them course by course with barbed wire between, and raise a wall strong enough to carry a roof — or corbel it into a dome.
Grass Thatch Roof
Bundle, comb and lash local grass onto a timber or bamboo frame at a steep pitch for a cool, quiet, no-cost roof that sheds heavy rain.
Dry-Stone Retaining Wall
Stack shaped field stone without mortar into a battered, through-stoned wall that drains freely and outlasts anything you could build with a bag of cement.
Soil-Cement Floor Slab
Replace a dust floor with a compacted, cement-stabilised earth slab that sweeps clean, resists damp and costs a fraction of a full concrete pour.
Community Slow Sand Filter
A tank of fine sand with a living biological layer on top that treats a household or small community's drinking water continuously, with no chemicals and no power.
Hand-Auger Borehole
Drill a small-diameter well by hand with a rotating auger and extension rods, then case and develop it — reaching cleaner water than an open dug well at a fraction of a rig's cost.
Safe Water Storage Vessel
Convert an ordinary jerrycan or clay pot into a narrow-mouth, tap-fitted, lidded storage vessel so treated water does not get recontaminated by hands and cups.
Drum Retort Charcoal Kiln
Char wood inside a sealed inner drum heated from outside, burning the smoke as fuel — far higher yield and far less smoke than an earth-mound burn.
Solar Phone Charging Bench
A small panel, charge controller and battery wired into a multi-port charging bench — reliable phone charging at home, or a shop that pays for itself in a season.
Windmill Water Pump
A multi-blade rotor on a guyed tower driving a piston pump down a shallow well — steady stock and irrigation water anywhere the wind blows most days.
TLUD Gasifier Stove
A top-lit updraft can stove that burns wood gas cleanly with a blue flame and leaves behind biochar instead of ash — cleaner cooking and a soil amendment from one burn.
Lined Tilapia Fish Pond
A hand-dug, lined pond stocked with tilapia and fed on farm waste — a protein and income source that also stores irrigation water.
Kenyan Top-Bar Beehive
A sloped-sided hive with removable top bars that lets you inspect and harvest comb without frames, foundation or imported equipment.
Raised Grain Granary
A woven or mud-plastered grain store raised on rat-guarded legs with a ventilated floor — cuts post-harvest loss without any chemicals.
Village Tree Nursery
Raise fruit, fodder and timber seedlings in polythene tubes under a shade frame — thousands of trees a year from a plot the size of a room.
Oyster Mushrooms on Straw
Pasteurise chopped straw, layer it with spawn in perforated bags, and crop oyster mushrooms in a dark shed within a month — high value from crop waste.
Manual Shea Butter Press
A bridge press with a screw jack that squeezes oil from roasted, ground shea kernels — cutting hours of hand-kneading and raising yield per basin.
Improved Fish Smoking Kiln
A chorkor-style stacked-tray kiln that smokes far more fish per load with less firewood and much less smoke in the operator's face.
Bicycle Cargo Trailer
A welded or bolted single-axle trailer with a flexible hitch that lets one bicycle move 80 – 100 kg of water, produce or tools over rough village roads.
Urine-Diverting Dry Toilet
A twin-vault toilet with a diverting pedestal that keeps urine and faeces separate, so faeces dry out odour-free and both streams become usable fertiliser.
Wattle & Daub Infill Wall
Weave a lattice of split poles between timber posts and pack it with clay-straw daub — the fastest low-cost wall there is when you have wood, soil and hands.
Bottle Wall Infill & Light Panel
Lay glass bottles in mortar between structural posts to fill non-load-bearing panels and bring daylight deep into a room without buying glazing.
Clay Brick Clamp Kiln
Stack green bricks into a self-firing clamp with fuel channels, seal it with mud, and fire your own burnt bricks without buying a permanent kiln.
Coil-Built Clay Water Jar
Build a wide-bellied storage jar by hand from coils of local clay and pit-fire it — cool water storage that costs only labour and fuel.
Gabion Check Dam for Gullies
Stack wire baskets filled with stone across an eroding gully to slow runoff, trap silt and let the channel heal itself into a planted terrace.
Sand Dam on a Seasonal River
Build a reinforced concrete wall across a sandy seasonal riverbed so each flood leaves coarse sand behind — a buried reservoir that holds clean water through the dry season.
Moringa Seed Water Clarification
Crush shelled Moringa oleifera seed into a milky suspension that binds silt and much of the bacterial load in turbid water, dropping it out as sludge in an hour.
Protected Spring Box
Cap a natural spring at its eye with a sealed masonry box and pipe it to a raised tap, so people collect flowing water that never touches the contaminated surface.
Basin Solar Still
Evaporate brackish or dirty water under a sloping glass cover and collect the condensate — slow, but it produces genuinely distilled water from sun alone.
Greywater Reed Bed
Route kitchen and washing water through a gravel-filled planted bed instead of a stinking pit, and irrigate fruit trees with the outflow.
Hydraulic Ram Pump
Use the shock of falling water to push a fraction of that flow far uphill — no fuel, no electricity, two moving valves, running day and night.
Pedal-Powered Generator
Mount a bicycle on a stand driving a permanent-magnet motor as a generator, and charge phones, lamps and radios with your legs when the grid and the sun are both out.
Banana Circle & Mulch Pit
Dig a shallow pit ringed with a soil berm, plant bananas and papaya on the ring, and feed the pit with kitchen water and green waste — a self-composting fruit machine.
Universal Nut Sheller
Cast a concrete rotor and stator with a tapered gap, crank it, and shell groundnuts fifty times faster than by hand without crushing the kernels.
Pedal-Driven Cassava Grater
Drive a punched-sheet grating drum from a bicycle chainset so one person can grate a sack of cassava in minutes instead of an afternoon of knuckle work.
Small Solar-Warmed Egg Incubator
Build an insulated box incubator with a thermostat and a small solar-charged battery to hatch 50 – 100 eggs where mains power is unreliable.
Hand Screw Palm Oil Press
Press digested palm fruit in a perforated steel cage with a screw jack, lifting oil recovery well above hand-squeezing while cutting the work in half.
Hand Grain Mill Station
Set a plate or stone mill on a solid waist-high bench with a good hopper and catch tray, and turn grinding from a back-breaking chore into a steady twenty-minute job.
Threshing Floor & Winnowing Set-Up
Lay a clean sealed threshing floor and build simple winnowing gear so grain comes off the field clean, dry and free of the grit that ruins flour and teeth.
Tiger Worm Toilet
Run a pour-flush or drop toilet onto a bed of composting worms in a drained vault, so faeces are digested in place and the pit fills at a fraction of the usual rate.
Interlocking Stabilised Soil Block Wall
Lay pressed blocks that key into each other so the wall goes up dry — far less mortar, far less cement, and a straight wall even with a small crew.
Micro-Concrete Roof Tiles
Vibrate thin sand-cement tiles on a simple screeding table and roof a house for a fraction of imported sheet cost — quieter in rain and far cooler inside.
DiagramStone Masonry Plinth & Foundation
The unglamorous course that decides whether an earth building lasts thirty years or three: a stone plinth that lifts the walls clear of splash and rising damp.
Bamboo Scaffold & Ladder
Lash a working platform and ladder from bamboo poles so you can plaster, roof and repair at height without hiring steel scaffold.
DiagramSplit Bamboo Rainwater Gutter
Turn a thatch or sheet roof into a water source with split bamboo gutters and a downpipe — the cheapest rainwater harvesting there is.
DiagramHousehold Chlorine Dosing Station
A measured-dose bottle and dispenser that makes safe chlorination routine instead of guesswork — the cheapest disease barrier in the water chain.
DiagramFolded Cloth Pre-Filter
Four to eight folds of clean cotton cloth over the collection pot strips out the silt, larvae and copepods that defeat chlorine and clog filters.
Buried Clay Pot (Olla) Irrigation
Bury unglazed clay pots between plants and fill them weekly — water seeps out at root depth on demand, cutting irrigation water by half or more.
DiagramTimber & Stone Tank Stand
A braced stand that lifts a full water tank safely to head height and gives you gravity pressure at the tap without a pump.
DiagramLee Hite Eco-Briquette Lever Press
The EWB-documented lever press that squeezes soaked waste paper and biomass into dense fuel briquettes — the design with real numbers behind it.
Hand-Cranked Screw Briquette Extruder
A screw auger in a tapering barrel that extrudes a continuous log of compacted biomass — higher output than a piston press once the feedstock is right.
Waste Paper & Leaf Briquettes
The simplest fuel in the library: soak waste paper and dry leaves, press by hand in a perforated tin, dry hard, and burn what would have been rubbish.
Cone Pit Biochar Kiln
A sloped-wall cone or flame-cap pit that turns crop residue and prunings into biochar with far less smoke than a smouldering pile.
DiagramRaised Biomass Drying Rack
The unglamorous rack that makes every fuel project work: raised, ventilated and shaded from rain so briquettes and firewood actually dry instead of moulding.
DiagramPacked Sawdust Tin Stove
Pack damp sawdust hard around a stick in a tin, pull the stick out, and light a stove that burns for an hour on waste from the timber yard.
Micro-Hydro Pelton Wheel
Where a stream drops ten metres or more, a spoon-bucket Pelton wheel on a penstock can run lights and charge batteries around the clock.
Shade Net Nursery Tunnel
A hooped shade tunnel that keeps seedlings alive through the hot months — the difference between a nursery that supplies a village and one that cooks in April.
DiagramSprouted Fodder Trays
Sprout barley or maize on stacked trays and turn one kilo of grain into six to eight kilos of green fodder in a week — dry-season feed without a pasture.
Raised Rabbit Hutch
A raised, slatted hutch that keeps rabbits dry, cool and off their own droppings — the fastest small livestock protein a household can start.
DiagramAirtight Metal Grain Silo
A sealed sheet-metal silo that suffocates weevils and larger grain borer without chemicals — the single best defence against post-harvest loss.
Community Seed Bank Store
A cool, dark, dry store with sealed jars, labelling and a lending register so a village keeps its own varieties instead of buying seed every season.
Beeswax Candle Making
Render comb wax from your top-bar hives and dip or mould clean-burning candles — a high-margin product from what most beekeepers throw away.
Recycled Tyre Sandal Workshop
Cut soles from worn car tyres and strap them with inner tube or leather — a sandal that outlasts anything in the market, made from waste.
Handmade Recycled Paper
Pulp waste paper with banana fibre or grass, pull sheets on a simple mould and deckle, and sell notebooks, cards and packaging from rubbish.
Sisal Rope Twisting Rig
A hand-cranked rope walk that lays sisal or banana fibre into three-strand rope — a genuinely useful product from a plant most people cut and burn.
Pour-Flush Latrine Pan & Water Seal
A cast pan with a water-seal trap turns a smelly pit into a clean, fly-free, odour-free toilet — flushed with two or three litres poured by hand.
Foot-Pedal Handwashing Station
A hands-free pedal station that runs on a jerrycan of water — no tap to touch, so washing hands doesn't recontaminate them.