Thamar Hela lives in fear of a hot, windy day. Her shack in Khayelitsha, like thousands of others across South Africa, is like a tinderbox.
"We had a fire last week," she said. "And two months ago, an electricity pole caught alight. In 2011, some neighbours - a husband and a wife - died in a fire that spread down a whole row after it broke out in an abandoned shack where robbers were smoking.
"Their young daughter was at her granny that night. She has gone back to Eastern Cape an orphan."
Over the next two weeks a new low-cost fire-detection device designed for shacks will change the lives of Hela and others like her.
The device, known as The Lumkani, costs R90 and activates devices in surrounding shacks within 20 seconds if a fire is not immediately brought under control.
It is not activated by a controlled cooking fire.
Francois Petousis, a student at the University of Cape Town Business School who heads a team of six responsible for the innovation, said: "The device is designed for a shack environment where people are cooking on open fires so it is not as sensitive as a normal fire detector. Instead, it senses a fast increase in heat."
It will be piloted in UT Gardens, Khayelitsha, in the next two weeks.
The device won the "people's choice award" in the Global Social Venture competition at the University of California, Berkeley earlier this year.
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