MIT Helps Third World With Hands-On Approach 128
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.'"
WHICH Third World? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that there is a wide range of poorer nations, every of which is "Third World". There are more advanced nations, like Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, there are some in the middle of the road, like India, Egypt, Pakistan, and then there are the desperately poor, like most of Africa.
The technology needed by each group is different. A cheap way of digging a well is not what the people living in a city slum need most. OTOH, a cheap computer will not be much help people who live in mud huts somewhere in Africa.
Re:Lost and found technology (Score:2, Insightful)
So, instead of trying to help the 3rd world countries with tech, we might just try not to harm them with our business practices and subsidies.
Just more first-worlders using third-worlders! (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd be more impressed if these types of events weren't just a way for the overly affluent to jet set around trying to justify an overly excessive and unsustainable lifestyle.
Speaking as a planet, we simply can't afford you!
Re:90% Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of these nations are poor because the Western nations have invaded, raped, pillaged and destroyed their cultures in pursuit of minerals and precious stones.
England enslaved India not because of their love for the curry, but because they wanted to dominate the spice trade.
Leopold invaded Congo for the rubber (which was derived solely from natural means).
I could go on, but /.'s disk space is probably limited.
Re:90% Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Trickle down (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:90% Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
a) The wealthiest 10% (referring to the population of the first world) live the way they do because the wealthiest 0.0001% of the world find it profitable to maintain them in a state of fat, mindless consumption.
b) Where do you think your TV, DVD player, cellphone, shoes, socks, PC are manufactured? I guarantee you that the hard labor required to manufacture these goods is not carried out by the fat, lazy people of the first world. They are too busy doing mindless administrative jobs in the office and then asking for time off due to a stubbed toe.
c) Your "survival of the fittest" attitude is a pathetic attempt at rationalizing your own profligate, wasteful and totally unsustainable lifestyle. You're like a child trying to tell yourself that stealing cookies is actually OK. Go travel, realize that the people in the third world actually are people, who work hard for their families and have the same hopes, dreams and ambitions that you have. The only difference between them and you is that their opportunity is undermined by the first world in the name of "profit" and they don't use abhorrent, broken logic to justify their own existence.
Re:Hey, I have a great Idea!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
No, we don't need your stupid help MIT. We need you [US] to stay home, and stop playing to be the world police.
Be careful what you wish for. Something even worse may step into the void.
Sustainability (Score:5, Insightful)
I talked to a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders Canada [ewb.ca] 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.
Re:90% Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
What you say is a big amount of bollocks.
I suggest you go visit IN PERSON any such country that you berate 'raped, pillaged, destroyed' by teh eviiiil western nations and see for yourself the real causes of their current state.
That should constitute for you a real eye-opening experience.
Re:90% Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Taking away the third world would be taking away factories, plants and workshops.
Or, they would come back to the first world, and prices would either go up or down (probably the former.)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:WHICH Third World? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just curious about your classification -- what makes Brazil and Mexico "advanced" and India and Egypt "middle of the road"? Aside from them being largely arbitrary classifications, the world's poor are pretty much the same everywhere. They're desperate, they have bleak futures and have a shockingly uniform form of suffering, no matter where they are. Small, ingenious innovations like those developed at MIT will benefit them regardless of which country they're in.
Trust me, the poorest, most rural regions of Brazil are not that different from the poorest, most rural regions of India or Thailand or Mexico. Don't assume that the newfound economic prosperity of countries like India and Brazil trickle down to the people who these inventions are targeted at.