MIT Helps Third World With Hands-On Approach

Hugh Pickens writes "About 60 people from 20 nations will descend on the MIT campus July 14th for the second annual International Development Design Summit to begin an intensive month-long process of creating technological solutions for the needs of people in the world's developing nations. The goal of the program is to develop simple, inexpensive devices that in some cases can be produced locally and make a real difference for people and communities. The event is the brainchild of MIT Senior Lecturer Amy Smith, a returned Peace Corps volunteer and a past winner of the MacArthur 'genius' grant. Previous products of Smith's design class include a bike-powered corn sheller, a metal press that can make clean-burning fuel out of agricultural waste, and an electricity-free incubator. The workshop promotes a shift in focus among companies, universities, investors and scientists toward attacking problems that hamper development in the world's poorest places. 'Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's population,' Ms. Smith said. 'The point of the design revolution is to switch that.'"

Comments

Engineers without borders plug

[OzPeter]

An appropriate place for a plug for Engineers without borders"

Re:90% Solution

[moniker127]

I am opposed to the argument that poor people are poor because they are doing something wrong. People can be born wealthy, or they can be born poor. The simple fact is, you can only make use of what your environment offers, and in third world countries, that is not much.

Interestingly, this is often wrong

[Kupfernigk]

One thing that holds poor people back is that their equipment is often very primitive. Any method of cooking that needs an open fire or has to heat up a lot of stone is very energy intensive. A Western halogen or induction hob is, by contrast, extremely efficient, heating only what is needed when it is needed. An open fire will often put 80% of the heat output straight up the chimney, whereas I have a very efficient Scandinavian solid fuel stove which puts more than 80% of its output into the house. But the cost of a Jotul or Morso stove would represent maybe five to ten years total income to a third world family.

This is why thinking like this is needed. Expensive but efficient technology needs to be commoditised for Third World production to bootstrap their economies.

Trickle down

[Anonymous Coward]

90% of research dollars may be spent on creating technologies that are targeted at the richest 10% of the population, but that doesn't mean they don't benefit the other 90%. Think of mobile phones, for example - originally aimed at the Western business elite, but they went on to revolutionise the African economy by creating a fast, efficient communication network between villages where it wasn't feasible to roll out wired infrastructure.

Free/Open Appropriate Technology

[vkg]

is turning into quite a movement.

http://appropedia.org/ is like wikipedia but, predictably, for appropriate technology.

http://hexayurt.com/ is a nice little emergency shelter (that's my project.)

http://globalswadeshi.net/ takes Gandhi's ideas (like the spinning wheel) and generalizes them into a global picture based on appropriate technology innovations

http://akvo.org/ does water technology

http://openfarmtech.org/ does a wide range of systems for a very high standard of living

and there's a lot more out there.

http://www.globalswadeshi.net/video has a series of video interviews with people working on appropriate technology in this general vein.

Sustainability

[seanthenerd]

It's great to see (reading the NY Times article) that this summit includes people from developing countries. Often, these sorts of things just involve people from developed countries dreaming up 'solutions' that sound awesome but wouldn't actually work on the ground, because the focus is only on the technologies and there isn't enough understanding of the people and societies in the developing countries or areas the technology is meant for.

I talked to a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders Canada who had this crazy story about rural villages in Mali (in western Africa). In almost every single town he visited (poor farming villages, actually) there was a deep, covered well and pump providing clean, healthy drinking water. And nobody used them. Instead, women from the villages would walk a few kilometres to collect water from a stagnant, parasite-infected pool of water.

Which seems ridiculous to us, maybe, except that collecting water by the pool was an important social event for these women (that standing in line at the well didn't duplicate at all), and that people thought the metal of the pump was unnatural - especially compared to a water source 'in nature', and that no one had really convinced the families in these villages that water from the pump would make their babies more likely to survive.

But it really goes to show that the best-intended engineering or technical solutions (in this case, a foreign NGO's decision a decade or two ago that every Malian village needed a water pump) won't succeed without a better understanding of the people they are meant to help. And that in the end, developing countries will never "make it" because of solutions 'handed down' by first-world organizations; in the end people there need to be empowered to improve their lives and their countries. First-world organizations can help with that, but we can't pretend to understand their communities' needs better than they do.